Named for a small, darting falcon that loves open country, the Kestrel Trust has helped preserve some 5,000 acres of land in the Valley from development since it got its start four decades ago.
The mission of the Kestrel Trust, and of kindred organizations across the country and around the world, is vital in these times, with the population booming even as climate change strains water supplies and turns vast areas into desert. The World Bank is studying the wave of purchases of agricultural land in Africa, South America and Asia by countries that are running short of growing land, and by corporate investors like Daewoo, which two years ago bought over a million hectares in Madagascar. In Massachusetts, seven acres of agricultural land are taken for development every day.
But when Kristin DeBoer, the Trust’s director, speaks of its work, she constantly reverts to the local level of it, the level that touches our sense of home.
“The Kestrel Trust is committed to preserving the heart of the valley,” she says. “The heart, to us, is the land and the rivers that run through the region we all call home. In terms of urgency [the urgency of preventing buildout], people love this area and they want to move here and live here.”
The Trust’s area of activity includes nine towns, Amherst, Belchertown, Granby, Hadley, Leverett, Pelham, South Hadley, Shutesbury and Sunderland. It came into being the same year as the Environmental Protection Agency and the so-called Water Quality Improvement Act (which paved the way for the Clean Water Act two years later), and rode the wave of the newly awakening American environmental consciousness, using donations and volunteer effort to protect farmland, woodland and riverfront acreage.
At the moment, says DeBoer, the crash of 2007 is giving the Trust room to pursue its acquisition strategies with slightly less competition from forces with other uses for open land. But that is not likely to be the case for long.
“Though we have something of a relief from development pressures due to the economy right now,” DeBoer explains, “the urgency is to preserve the land before it’s too late. Within the nine towns there are a number of proposals for large-scale subdivisions that were being developed before the recession and have been put on hold. Those are the properties that are really interesting right now because they’re hanging in the balance. They’re worth a lot because they could be developed, yet they can’t be developed now because of the recession. They’re in that limbo state. Those are the ones that have gone through major subdivision permitting, and the developers don’t want to lose that money.”
But DeBoer explains that her group’s relationship with developers is not simply an adversarial one. The paradox developers are up against in the Valley is that the abundance of open land is one reason people want to live here, and if the area is built out, it will lose an important part of its appeal. When it comes down to individual sales, view and proximity to open land add to the value of a property.
Developers whose projects interfere with the viewshed get themselves a lot of bad PR, too, as happened some years ago when a local firm, Bercume Builders, planned to build homes on a slope of Mt. Holyoke. Such a storm of public protest erupted that the landowner finally sold the parcel to the state instead.
“I think most developers understand that the value of living here is tied to protecting the land as well,” DeBoer says.
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The Kestrel Trust uses private donations to leverage public funding—state grants, Community Preservation Act money and other resources—to acquire property for transfer to the state or other organizations that maintain it as open land, or to help finance the placing of permanent conservation restrictions on land. It meets its goals by dealing painstakingly with landowners and their families—by moving ahead one conversation at a time, putting in the effort to understand each landowner’s situation.
“Ideally land is protected at the wholesale level, before it’s carved up into lots,” DeBoer says. “Ideally the conversation starts at the kitchen table.”
As opposed to the stereotype of the greedy farmer waving a wad of money as he walks away from a deal with a developer, many people aren’t happy to sell large acreages for development, and only do it to relieve heavy financial pressures.
“There are a number of landowners who are 87, 90 years old who are facing nursing home costs, financing their kids’ college,” says DeBoer. “These are real financial needs.”
What makes the Trust’s task of negotiating hardest to do? “The landowner negotiation piece is the most rewarding, but also the most challenging,” says DeBoer. “The biggest obstacle is when a landowner perceives that their land is worth a million dollars when it’s really not. So it’s the perception—and what we try to do is base it on objective appraisals. In addition to the price, it’s often a generational transfer where, instead of being owned by the couple, the land is owned by several siblings, and some may live in Florida or California, and they all have different views.” Once, she recalls, the Trust took on a project involving 17 heirs.
“The most pressure we feel,” she adds, “is when the landowner chooses to put the land on the market before talking to us or another land trust or conservation agency. Once that for sale sign goes up, our hearts start pounding and we feel that we’re racing against the clock.”
Nevertheless, says DeBoer, the Trust doesn’t like to get preachy with landowners and put them under pressure. “I have a sense sometimes that it’s kind of like Thanksgiving dinner,” she muses. “You don’t want to get into politics and spoil the nice time you’re having. You want to find common ground. Most landowners are quite reasonable, and often end up making bargain sales—discounted sales or partial donations of value—in order to conserve their land based on the available funding.”
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It’s a bright spot in these hard economic times that dynamic new programs involving coalitions of conservation organizations are protecting more than one parcel at a time. The Kestrel Trust is coordinating a group of seven conservation organizations, including, locally, Valley Land Fund, Connecticut River Watershed Council, Rattlesnake Gutter Trust and Franklin Land Trust, that were recently given $260,000 by AmeriCorps to start new conservation projects and monitor existing ones for compliance with the terms under which they were set up.
The Trust is also cooperating with the Wildlands and Woodlands Initiative on the Western Massachusetts Pilot Aggregation Project, a program to help 71 families who own forest land protect more than 10,000 acres in the western counties. The Wildlands and Woodlands Initiative was begun by Harvard Forest activists who want to see 70 percent of New England remain in forest permanently, and hope to double the pace of forest protection by 2060.
The Kestrel Trust has been concentrating for some time now on the Great Meadow, the farmland stretching north of the Norwottuck Rail Trail in the western part of Hadley. The unfenced parcels there retain the configuration laid out by settlers in the seventeenth century, which makes the Great Meadow a place of great historic interest as well as agricultural productivity and scenic beauty. On October 17 the Trust will sponsor the second annual 5K Run and 2 Mile Walk to raise money for the preservation of land in the Great Meadow. The walk begins and ends on Hadley’s West Street Common (the longest public green in Massachusetts), following a flat course through the Meadow.
For information, check www.kestreltrust.org.
