Redwood Reader

Sundays Chroncle had an excellant piece on conservation easements and how they work. Conservation easements mainly apply to private lands but not necessarily so. In the future, conservation easements may also allow for the long term storage of carbon dioxide and water production rather than as timber or farmland and without threat of development. They may also be alternate income for steep or otherwise difficult land to operate on.
I mentioned last week Headwaters Agreement appeared to be a conservation easement. That means the restricitons provided stay with the Title of the land they are on, and as such would not be subject to lifting those restricitons in eveny of bankruptcy or change of ownership. Conservation easeements require a group to hold these easements into the future and funding to ensure compliance. In the case of Headwaters, the taxpayers purchased the timber outright but also agrreed to allow logging under certain conditions. I do not believe our government intended to allow these restricitons to fall by the wayside just because a heavily indebted company goes bankrupt. The People wanted to be sure the remaining timberlands were not devastated isolating the Headwaters, and they have paid for it in the deal they made.
Conservation easemennts are playing a larger role as we try to preserve the landscape and retain sustainable activities. Acquisitions continue in the area as well as the easements. A large sum was recently paid to maintain several large landowners operations in the name of sustainability. But the concept is generally vague. The users of second growth examine the product of a forest but not the condition of the forest it came from. The long range effects of activity are not considered. And opportunities to take positive steps are missed entirely. Longtime landowners have learned how to maintain their operation into the future but they are always at risk of new owners or a change of heart resulting in a new round of disturbance. Conservation easements protect landscapes into the future and allow people a say in how their land will be managed far into the future.
If we consider the damage to a watershed in dimensions we can see lots of reduction in capacity. Roads, buildings, pavement, lawns, pasture, farmland, riverbars and logged forests have all had thier ability to infiltrate and store water diminished. In all cases glomalin has been destroyed and released back to the atmosphere, returning topsoil to silt and clay. Each activity after that then is a matter of degree of restoration of the original water storage mechanism the local ecosystem survived on, and the time since that the glomalin zone has had to regrow itself. Thus buildings, roads, and pavement have zero infiltration or storage. Mowed lawns probably have a small retention factor, whereas unmowed perrenial grasses have a considerably larger precipitiation interception volume and a deeper root zone. It takes a lot more rain to flood a field of deep grass than a lawn, and more still for brush. Similarly, farmlands have reasonable amounts of glomalin storing water. In many area, however, the repeated ploughing nad tilling were destroying glomalin as it wa sproduces each yar. The newer no-till methods should be allowing the land to absorb larger quantities of rainfall, diminshing the ever present flood threat. In each case the watershed has beeen reduced in capacity in the third dimension.
Thus watersheds lose a lot of capability when logged. Clearcuts reduce an areas capacity to near zero, and cannot contribute to the summer water needs of its creek. They are releasing ground stored carbon and should be accounting for it. Short ortations do not allow trees to regrow their root zone to full capacity, you cannot replace two hundred or more years of soil conditioning in fifty years. Smaller trees intercept less of the precipitation to percolate and allowing runoff to occur before the ground is saturated. Mindlessly directed drainages then will cause failure between the collection point, often a road, and the creek at the bottome of the watershed.Runoff is always a negative in our perfect world and what we strive to avoid. Runoff causes most watershed instability and sedimentation problems. General ignorance of this is leading to a dessication of Western forests in the corrent drought cycle. The trees have survived thus type of drought in the past but their resiliency has been compromised by their reduced water reservoir. Select cuts keep the reservoir more or less intact depending on the amount of ground disturbance and canopy removal. PL's old method of one entry every ten years and always with an eye toward leaving a functioning work area is why they survived until the eighties. Current methods, regardless of how many scientists they are paying, does not understand the twin problems of carbon release from ground disturbance and depleted water storage. A general degradation of their properties is occurring that is new to them because old management neverr cut this hard. They had seen it before and were watching it happen all along the coast.
Watershed restoration measns replacing the capacity to intercept sotore and retain water late in the year. The natural world uses fungi to condition soil to accept and hold water where it is available to many life forms. To be effective the watershed must have some percentage of functioning capacity remaining and an ability to preserve and grow subsoil capacity and aquifer recharge areas. Trees and fungi do this best. Rather than wood quality, the most important function of secend growth is restoration of the root zone through carbon fixation in the soil. The second growth trees are forced to spend a lot of energy replacing wood and green processing cells in the leaves. Excess growth is needed for sloughing as duff in order to protect the subsoil from running water and raindrops. Douglas firs' strategy is mass germination with everybody crowding in close contributing to the new soil zone. As the trees grow competition thins the trees out. They are recycled into the duff layer and the general carbon budget of the forest. It is the accumulation of glomalin from all of these trees that allows a few to survive the frirst few years, eventually thinning thenselves to a few large trees per acre, but with millions of mycorhizzia working the enironment trading carbon for nutrients with the soil and producing droplet froming aerosols.
Being from Long Island I watched development eat up our farms and woodlands. Eventually the county began buying development rights from crop jarmers, only allowing them to sell to other farmers. But grape growers and horsemen changed the face of farming there anyway, although open space was maintianed. Similarly, long term preservation of our forests and farms can also help in the global warming situation. Indeed, carbon credits with conservation easemenets should be marketable for carbon storage. The beauty of this scheme is we get to restore watersheda nd fisheries and get annual income from it simply by maintaining it and keeping fire risk in check, allowing occasional select cuts or commercial thinning. Conservation easements can project the leases far into the future and may be made available entirely on the open market, or through an agency. A scale of pay for infiltration thus emerges with percentages paid generally on the type of groound cover, easily demonstrated by vegetation layers on GIS maps.
Accelerated regrowth is also possible with innoculation of seed trees with many types of mycorhizzia rather than the one or two currently used. Reports of annual growth in excess of five feet is reported for Douglas fir innoculated at planting time with a mixture of fifity or so species of fubgi. This is far better than grafted trees and even rivals redwood stump sprouts. The essential need is to restore the two way pumping of water and carbon products as fast as possible on as wide a range as possible. Active capture improves our natural systems and so should be sought rather than suffer from failure to act or have it imposed out of necessity. It also does not require the complicated processes involved in pumping CO2 into deep underground storage where the ability to trap it is not even known, and for tens of millions of dollars. We can do better with that money, and the gas can help us. THere is a lot to learn but practical solutions to a variety of local and global issues are finally at hand.

Stewards of the land Conservation easements keep farm and ranchlands, vacation
hideaways in the hands of families and away from the paving contractor

- Serena Herr, Special to The ChronicleSunday, February 6, 2005
It's a story
you've probably heard: A family owned a cherished vacation retreat, where the
kids spent summers and traditions were born.
But when the property passed to
the children, its value had skyrocketed, and whether because the heirs couldn't
afford the taxes or one of them wanted to cash in, the land had to be sold.
The family lost not only the property but also a piece of family history,
while the land was subdivided and buried under an avalanche of new houses.
That could have been Dr. Frances Conley's story. Last year, Conley inherited
her parents' cabin and 191-acre redwood forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains and
faced an estate tax bill she couldn't pay.
"This is land my folks bought in
the early 1960s, and they enjoyed it tremendously, every weekend," she said. "By
the time it was reappraised, the estate taxes were astronomical. I truly loved
this piece of land, and didn't want to have to sell it."
Instead, Conley
took advantage of a little-known land-protection technique called a conservation
easement. Conley agreed to legally donate the rights to log and develop the
property -- which she didn't intend to use anyway -- to the nonprofit Peninsula
Open Space Trust, which is based in Menlo Park.
Because the forest land
could no longer be commercially logged or developed, its appraised value
plummeted, and so did the estate taxes. In addition, Conley received a
charitable deduction and her property tax bill went down.
Deeded as open
space forever
But the main thing for Conley was that she preserved the land.
"My siblings have children and grandchildren, and it was important for me to
save it for the next generation to enjoy," said Conley, a former professor of
neurosurgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine. "We can still sell
the land, but the conservation easement goes with it forever, as part of the
deed."
Virtually unheard of before 1970, the conservation easement has
emerged in the past two decades as a white knight in the battle to save open
space and agricultural land. According to the nonprofit Land Trust Alliance,
nearly 2.6 million acres nationwide have been protected through easements held
by local and regional land trusts, compared to just 450,000 acres in 1990.
But what often is overlooked is the tremendous benefit that conservation
easements can offer private landowners who want to keep their beloved land in
the family and make sure it continues to be used as a retreat, a farm, or a
ranch, rather than a golf course or a housing development.
Reaching back
from the grave
"A large percentage of landowners would like to control the
use of their property from the grave," said John Gamper, director of taxation
and land use for the California Farm Bureau in Sacramento. "A perpetual
conservation easement is the only way to do that." It provides a legal framework
within which the family can create a clear statement of intended use.
"One
of the best things about conservation easements is how flexible they are," said
Paul Ringold, the open space trust's director of land stewardship. "You can
structure an easement any number of ways, taking into account each landowner's
needs."
Conley's easement, for example, sets aside a family-use area where
she or her successor can build a single house.
Another recent easement lets
POST build a public trail connecting the beautiful 624-acre Redgate Ranch to
nearby park land south of Half Moon Bay.
In that deal, landowner Greg Jones
donated about 60 percent of the easement's value, and the trust paid cash for
the remainder. "Until six months ago, I thought easements were mainly for really
rich people to get a tax deduction" said Jones, who with his wife and two young
daughters grows red oats on the farm and uses it as a weekend retreat. "I didn't
understand it as a good tool for people to protect their land and realize some
of its development value."
Now, said Jones, "This land will always be farm
land. It won't ever be condos. Having grown up on a ranch on the coast, I feel
good about that."
One area where easements are especially effective is
agricultural conservation, because they protect the land while keeping it in
productive use. In California, where farmland is expensive to keep and
attractive to sell, it's not easy for farmers and ranchers to pass up the chance
to develop.
Millions of acres paved
According to a recent study by the
University of California Agricultural Issues Center, Californians pave over
about 50,000 acres of productive farmland each year, or about half a million
acres each decade. To put that in perspective, all the state's cities together
make up just 5.5 million acres.
One of the most successful programs is
operated by the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, which during the past 25 years
has used easements to protect 36, 000 acres -- almost 35 percent -- of Marin
County's farmland. Trust projects include such well-known Bay Area brands as the
Straus organic dairy and the Robert Giacomini dairy, makers of Point Reyes blue
cheese.
"Given the very high prices of agricultural land because of our
proximity to the Bay Area," said Executive Director Bob Berner, "there is no
question that using easements is the only way we could have protected so much."
He wouldn't get any argument from Frank Long, half a state away in the
Sierra foothills. Long, 76, is a second-generation rancher who, with his wife
and two sons, has raised cattle on 3,100 acres in Mariposa County for 54 years.
Long says he looked around his property about six years ago and didn't like
what he saw. "All the way around us, the land is zoned for 5-acre lots," he
said. "My whole ranch was under residential zoning in the new county plan, so
sooner or later, someone was going to say, 'Look, all that land is zoned
residential.' And neither I nor my boys would be here to protect it."
Long
looked into donating an easement, but ultimately figured out something better.
He worked with the San Francisco Trust for Public Land, the state Wildlife
Conservation Board and the local Sierra Foothills Conservancy on a complicated
deal to sell the development rights to about 90 percent of his ranch for almost
fair market value.
To pay for the easement, the San Francisco trust got a
$1.425 million grant from the state's oak woodlands conservation program. The
land qualified for the grant thanks to Long's stewardship: Most of the ranch is
covered with mature blue oak woodlands, making it one of the largest contiguous
areas of blue oak habitat in single private ownership.
"It helped us
financially," said Long, who paid off two mortgages. "But my main goal was to
have this ranch stay as a working ranch in perpetuity, even after I and the boys
are gone. I've always been a rancher. I like the work, the freedom, the strong
relationships I've built with my neighbors. It's great to drive out and look at
the calves with their mothers, or to look at the stars, and it's real quiet out
here."
Long's easement stipulates that the land must be used as operational
rangeland no matter who owns it. The Sierra Foothills Conservancy is legally
bound to enforce the easement. His sons can keep the land, sell it to another
rancher, lease it or donate it to the land trust, but the conservation easement
goes with the deed.
"People are coming up here from San Jose, selling their
homes for big money, and buying 160-acre parcels for a home site," said Long
with exasperation. "Ranching is becoming residential. But you just can't take
all the good land out of production. This makes sure at least some rangeland
will stay that way."

Conservation easements
What they are:
Easements are voluntary legal agreements between landowners and conservation
organizations that permanently limit the use of land to protect its conservation
or agricultural values.
People grant easements because they want to protect
their property from inappropriate development while retaining ownership of the
land. Easements allow landowners to continue to own and use the land and to sell
it or pass it on to their heirs, often with significant tax savings.
How
they work:
When you donate a conservation easement to a land trust, you
agree to give up some of the rights associated with the land. For example, you
might give up the right to build on the land, but keep the right to continue to
grow crops on the land. Or you might give up development rights but keep the
option to build one house on a low-impact site.
The land trust is
responsible for making sure the easement's terms are followed. The trust
monitors the property on a regular basis to implement the conditions of the
easement and ensure that the property remains in the state prescribed in the
agreement.
Source: Peninsula Open Space Trust

Find out more
American Farmland Trust
(916) 753-1073
www.farmland.org

Founded in 1980 by a group of farmers and
conservationists, AFT is a national nonprofit dedicated to protecting
agricultural resources. It provides technical assistance to landowners, private
groups and public agencies..
The California Farm Bureau
(916) 561-5500
www.cfbf.com
California's largest farm
organization with 89,000 members, the farm bureau is a nongovernmental,
nonpartisan organization seeking solutions for land-use, economic, and social
issues faced by farm and ranch families..
State Coastal Conservancy
(510) 286-1015
www.coastalconservancy.ca.gov

Created in 1976, the
conservancy is an independent state agency that protects, restores and enhances
California's coastal resources. It protects and enhances land, helps resolve
land-use conflicts and provides technical and financial help for land-protection
projects in the coastal zone..
Land Trust Alliance
(202) 638-4725
www.lta.org
Established in 1982, LTA is a
membership organization providing training and information to land trusts. A
good resource for finding a local land trust in your area..
The Trust for
Public Land
(415) 495-4020
www.tpl.org <http://www.tpl.org>
Founded in 1972, TPL is a national land conservation organization that
preserves open space for public use. The trust specializes in conservation real
estate transactions and joint ventures with government agencies and local land
trusts.