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| Westchester Land Trust helped protect Stuart's Farm, a 170-acre fruit, flower, vegetable and cut-your-own Christmas tree farm in Somers, in partnership with New York State, Westchester County, the Watershed Agricultural Council, and the Town of Somers. |
Westchester Land Trust has helped protect 7,552 acres in 28 communities, and our goal is to reach 10,000 acres by the end of 2012.
To get there, we are reaching out to more landowners, more community groups, and more government officials, to ensure that we know what the preservation opportunities are and that they know we want to work with them.
We protect land in three basic ways:
1. We work with private landowners on donations of conservation easements; and we work with local planning boards and developers on conservation easements that arise through the development review process. In all, we have protected 4,601 acres on 184 conservation easements, most of which remain privately owned.
2. We work with landowners who donate their land, which we then own. We have 625 acres on 29 of these preserves, 14 of which are open to the public (nine have trails).
3. We work with local, county, state and other governments to identify land worth buying, and then we help negotiate contracts and put together funding agreements. We've protected 2,326 acres on 17 such preserves and farms (including Stuart's Farm, in Somers, pictured above).