Farmland lost
"Farmland lost is farmland lost forever." – Essex County Countryside Alliance
Lancaster County native Ann Carter was always concerned about the future of her property near Merry Point. The 165-acre tract had been in the family for three hundred years. Her parents’ house still stands on the land. The retired teacher and small business owner says she was not interested in selling the land to anyone who might want to create a subdivision or build a marina. Instead, she wanted to preserve the woodlands as they were.
“Quite some time ago, I heard about the advantages of putting one’s land under conservation easement, and I thought that was perfect,” Carter says. But when she looked into the matter initially, she found the process daunting. Then she met Mary Louisa Pollard, a founder of the Northern Neck Land Conservancy.
“Mary Louisa kind of held my hand as I went through the all the steps,” she explains. In 2008 Carter’s property was officially placed under easement, meaning that it cannot be developed. But the family still has use of the property. In fact, Carter’s daughter is living there now.
The arrangement also made sense to Wallace Carter, who owns a 170-acre tract in Lancaster County. “I was a farmer all my life, and I wanted the land I had worked to remain farmland,” he says. Like Ann, he found help at the Northern Neck Conservancy when he was ready to turn his desire into reality.
Jamie Tucker, executive director at the Northern Neck Land Conservancy (NNLC), says the organization was incorporated in 2004 to assist people like the Carters negotiate the sometimes intricate process of obtaining a conservation easement on their land. “A conservation easement is a written legal agreement that provides landowners a way to place their property in a permanently preserved state,” she explains. Typically, third parties hold these easements and assume responsibility for making sure the terms of the easement are maintained. The NNLC has assisted landowners in protecting 15,057 acres with conservation easements.
David Evans gives kudos to the NNLC for making the process understandable and providing advice when he needed it. The veteran Richmond attorney always wanted to own farmland. In 2007 he realized his dream, purchasing a farm across the road from the home in Lancaster County that he had bought five years earlier. Wanting to preserve the property as farmland, he began the easement process in 2012, completing it in August 2013.
Evans admits the prospect of moving through the steps required to complete the easement may look formidable to some, since even he was not familiar with the intricacies of creating an easement and receiving tax credits. “I’m a lawyer but not a real estate attorney,” he explains.
Evans worked with the Virginia Outdoor Foundation (VOF), which completed an initial survey to determine if his farm qualified for a conservation easement. The results of this survey went before a citizens’ board, which decided whether or not to accept the easement. VOF now holds the easement on Evans’s property.
The NNLC’s Tucker says that for the Evans land, VOF serves as a watchdog to see that terms of the easement are being met. On several of the eight properties where the NNLC is coholder of the easement, one of the five counties served by the NNLC is the other coholder and enforces the terms of the easement. Kenneth Eades, county administrator for Northumberland County, is quick to point out why. “We’ve already seen a large portion of the county’s waterfront developed as subdivisions. One of the goals of our Comprehensive Plan is to promote land use and development practices that preserve the rural character of the county,” he says.
Even though easements affect tax revenues, Eades says, the majority of Northumberland County citizens want to protect farmlands and woodlands from being developed. “Assisting landowners to place their land under easement allows us to exercise good stewardship.”
The move to preserve the rural character of Essex County is also going strong, thanks to the efforts of the Essex County Countryside Alliance (ECCA). Founded in 2007, the association promotes an array of conservation options to local landowners.
“We want to educate the public about the benefits of protecting land in perpetuity,” says ECCA president Peter Bance. The association seeks to maintain productive farms, forests, and fisheries and protect natural resources that serve as habitats for indigenous wildlife. ECCA is also interested in preserving the county’s historic resources and providing recreational opportunities.
Bance believes resources in the Rappahannock River Valley are under multiple threats. Writing to members of the ECCA in the association’s annual magazine, he notes some alarming trends. Rising sea and salinity levels are changing the make-up of river water, threatening rare plants, waterfowl, and marshlands. Compounding the problem is the continuing development along the river valley. He cites statistics provided by John Page Williams, senior naturalist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, that the Rappahannock River valley has seen a hundredfold increase in the human population in the past four hundred years.
“Continuing development in the Rappahannock watershed contributes to the decline in our water quality. Impending development is best contained by conservation easements,” he writes. Bance takes pride in noting that the ECCA has assisted Essex county landowners in placing more than 20,000 acres under easement. Bance’s family has already put the ECCA president’s words into action, placing their farm, Wheatland, under conservation easement to protect it from future development.
Jim Smith of the Mathews Land Conservancy (MLC) says that organization has a different take on conservation. “We were founded twenty years ago when a group of citizens banded together to prevent the Williams Wharf complex on the East River from being demolished. Most of our efforts have been focused on preserving that area and converting it into an educational and recreational resource for the community.”
Established in Colonial times, the wharf on the East River was a center of maritime activity for more than a century. Its shipbuilding business once rivaled the one in Newport News, but in the twentieth century, it had been used for various commercial enterprises before being acquired by the MLC. At the moment, the MLC is working through the bureaucratic process of gaining approvals to construct a new rowing and sailing center at the Williams Wharf site while working out final designs for the structure.
The MLC has several other properties, including Bayside Landing, Sandy Point, acreage close to Fort Nonsense, and a newly donated timber tract. “We haven’t been heavily involved in helping people gain conservation easements on their property,” Smith says, pointing out that there are other organizations in the state that provide that service. “Our principal mission has been to acquire land that we can manage for the community’s benefit. That can mean access to water, creation of green space, or use of historical properties for education and preservation purposes.”
Smith thinks the MLC has been able to garner support within Mathews because the organization has, from its inception, kept a laser-like focus on Mathews County. “Everything we do is for the benefit of Mathews County and its citizens,” he says.
The NNLC’s Tucker believes the same is true throughout the region, noting that the land conservancy movement has struck a chord with people who have fallen in love with this secluded corner of the state. While she acknowledges that most landowners are happy to learn that they can reduce the value of their land for estate tax purposes and may qualify for tax credits from the state of Virginia, most people express a more personal reason for working with land conservancies. She says, “People in our area are keenly interested in what we’re doing because they consider this region a special place to live. They want future generations to enjoy it as they have.”
This article appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of The Local Scoop Magazine, pgs. 61-63.