Land Conservation in North Carolina
By Elizabeth Hunter
- Introduction
- What are land trusts?
- Are there financial benefits?
- What about farmland?
- What Can You Do?
A growing number of Tar Heel residents are taking steps to protect land they love. In Pasquotank County, retired farmers Murphy and Nancy Sample donated a conservation easement on 200 acres of farmland to the N.C. Coastal Land Trust in 2001. Tenants now grow soybeans, corn and cabbages on the land that had been in Murphy Sample’s family for more than 100 years. "We wanted to keep our land the way it is—on and on and on—instead of going into concrete," Nancy Sample says simply.
Land trusts are non-profit organizations that offer
communities and private citizens a variety of voluntary management and
conservation strategies to permanently protect land.
Conservation easements— which are legal agreements that permanently
restrict the way a parcel of land is used in order to protect its conservation
values—are popular protection tools because they allow landowners
to retain ownership of their property, while giving up certain rights
associated with it. Future owners are also bound by an easement’s
terms (which is why land under conservation easement is said to be protected
"in perpetuity"). The land trust accepting the easement is responsible
for monitoring the property to ensure that the easement’s terms
are being followed.
Conservation easements are flexible. "You can provide for different purposes and land uses within the format of a single easement," says Tom Smith, president of the National Committee for the New River, a conservation organization whose protection efforts include a land trust program. Ten years ago, Smith and his mother were approached by NCNR about placing a conservation easement on the part of the family farm that bordered the river. Initially, "we were not warm to the idea of giving up our property rights," he recalls. But Smith researched the issue, and decided conservation easements could help them keep the farm in the family—and protect the river’s viewshed.
Landowners negotiating donation or sale of a conservation easement with a land trust "need to establish a comfort zone early on, to be in agreement on the purpose of the easement," Smith says. "It has to involve the public good in some way, by preserving open space or water quality or wildlife habitat. You can’t get an easement on your back yard. But easements can really help farm families retain ownership of their land. If you do it right, a conservation easement is an effective tax management tool."
Among the incentives conservation offers are tax benefits, including federal income tax deductions and state income tax credits (based on a certified appraisal of the difference in value between the land with its development rights intact, and its value without them). North Carolina has generous income tax credits for conservation gifts. Additionally, granting an easement may reduce a landowner’s estate, property and capital gains taxes.
North Carolina provides the tax incentives because development—once viewed as an unqualified good—is increasingly revealing its downside, in vanishing farmland, degraded streams, clogged highways and urban sprawl. The state’s population grew by 21.4 percent in the 1990s, a boom that was echoed by a corresponding development explosion. Between 1992 and 1997, open land was converted to development at the rate of 11.6 acres per hour. A third of the half-million acres developed in North Carolina during that period was prime farmland, according to the USDA’s National Resources Inventory.
The American Farmland Trust set up an office in Graham not long ago to address an increasing threat to North Carolina’s farmland. Among the places where AFT has been working is Rowan County, a once-rural landscape of rolling wooded hills and farms that is feeling tremendous development pressure. With help from AFT and the Land Trust for Central North Carolina, county commission chairman Steve Blount and other community leaders have crafted a Rowan County Farmland Preservation Plan to establish funding sources within the county to match state and federal dollars for farmland preservation. Its goal is to enable the county to purchase development rights to permanently preserve its most significant farmland.
Not all farm families can afford to make donations of their land, even if they’d like to. Land is often a farm family’s only real asset. Lots of farmers would like another alternative than selling to a developer. They’d like to be able to hold onto their land, to pass it on to future generations, and at the same time realize some kind of return. One way they can do that is by selling development rights.
Two important sources of money that land trusts have drawn upon are the Farmland Preservation Trust Fund and the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, though both have suffered from state budget cuts.
If you own undeveloped land that you’d like to see protected and you don’t know the name or telephone number for the land trust in your area, contact the Conservation Trust for North Carolina at (919) 828-4199. The Conservation Trust since 1991 has helped land trusts, community groups and landowners conserve land and water. CTNC is the only statewide land trust of its kind, providing central services for the state’s 24 land trusts, including information exchange, coordination, public policy representation and financial assistance. The Conservation Trust has protected nearly 20,000 acres through direct protection actions, most of it along the Blue Ridge Parkway. All together, North Carolina's land trusts have protected some 85,000 acres in more than 400 places. Visit the CTNC Web site at www.ctnc.org. A map on its homepage shows locations of land trusts across the state. CTNC can direct you to a local or regional land trust where you live.
Join your local or regional land trust. Membership dues help underwrite costs, and you can help spread the word to friends and neighbors about ways to help preserve North Carolina’s remaining open space.
Elizabeth Hunter is a freelance writer who lives in Mitchell County. She is a member of French Broad EMC.