For a landowner, the decision to sell or donate an agricultural conservation easement is a momentous one that is not made lightly or quickly. Negotiated voluntarily with a nonprofit or public land-trust agency, conservation easements restrict the use of a particular parcel; the landowner can continue farming after the easement is purchased, but the land can never be subdivided or developed. Land in easements can be bought or sold, but the restrictions remain in perpetuity. The decision to sell, then, depends on the landowner’s willingness to forego the profitable option of selling the land for urban development in return for more modest economic gains and other benefits. While cash or tax advantages provide immediate benefits to the present landowner, future generations and owners carry the costs in terms of restrictions and limited opportunities.Based on extensive interviews with 46 owners of easement-restricted farms in three counties , we have examined landowner motivations for selling easements and their experiences with local programs that acquired the easements . The landowners in most cases were enthusiastic sellers of the easements. Their main motivations were cash, family ownership and conservation, and they reported generally satisfactory experiences with the easement programs. To a lesser degree they expressed concerns about certain aspects of the process, especially negotiations and monitoring, and suggested ways that easement programs can improve their relationships with landowners. Most of the landowners interviewed are located in two North Bay counties, the region that contains most of California’s farmland easement acres and easement programs. Given the unique conservation, landscape and agricultural characteristics of this region, it’s not yet clear what the prospects are for easement programs statewide and in the agriculturally rich Central Valley,flood table where they are much less well-established .The landowners who participated in this study are involved in three of the most active agricultural easement programs in California.

The programs are countywide in scope. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust and Yolo Land Trust are private, nonprofit organizations, chartered under state law to engage in conservation activities. The Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District is a public district formed by a county ballot initiative in 1990 and operated by a county government agency. Their easements total more than 53,000 acres, nearly half of all agricultural easement acres in California. Both the Marin and Sonoma county programs are among the six largest local agricultural easement programs in the nation . We surveyed 46 landowners in the Sonoma, Marin and Yolo county programs by phone and in person from February to August 1999, using a standardized interview guide. The interviews ranged from 15 minutes to 1 hour and were taped and later transcribed for analysis. Interview topics included questions about motivations, negotiations with land trusts, perceptions about program success and other experiences related to their conservation easement. The 46 landowners represented 44% of the total of 105 landowners participating in the three programs. Thirty-seven had sold such easements in recent years; the other nine owners had recently purchased parcels with easements already in place . Their parcels represented a majority of the total 53,000 easement acres held by the three programs at that time. The average parcel size was 530 acres.The survey revealed some common threads about why landowners made the decision to sell development rights . While the 37 original sellers of easements gave seven discrete reasons, there were obvious similarities and overlaps. Combined, three major motivations surfaced: to preserve land for farming and/ or open space ; to provide cash for savings and retirement, for farm improvements or to reduce debt ; and to serve family needs such as estate settlements and generational transfers.Most respondents cited a combination of at least two of these motivations. Certainly cash was a powerful incentive, since giving up development rights typically meant that the landowners received at least several hundred thousand dollars per transaction and more than a million dollars in a few cases.

But in many cases the cash was valued mainly as a vehicle for accomplishing one or another of the other objectives. Personal attachment to a parcel was another widely held sentiment, with many respondents noting a long history of family ownership and the importance of their farms as home sites. Several landowners spoke about the need to facilitate an intergenerational transfer. The immediate goal for some was to overcome a fragmented family ownership that made continued farming uncertain. The cash from the easementsale could help the younger family members purchase the parcel from the older generation or prepare for the transition by paying down existing farm debt or improving the farm operation. In one situation, the farm operator used the proceeds from the easement sale to secure full control of the land by buying out the ownership shares of his siblings. Surprisingly, the permanence of a deed restriction — the issue of keeping the land in agriculture in perpetuity, essentially forever — did not discourage landowners from selling easements. However, this sample includes only participating landowners and not those who might have chosen not to sell because of this restriction. Only five respondents expressed some discomfort with the permanent nature of their easement. In fact, for the majority of landowners, perpetuity was considered an advantage because their goal was to pass the land on, undeveloped, to future generations. One respondent did argue for less-than-permanent easements because he felt they were more compatible with the economic fluctuations in agriculture. For most of the nine landowners in the three counties who purchased their properties after the development rights had been removed, having an easement in place was considered an advantage. The principal reason, they said, is that it made the purchase more affordable. By eliminating the possibility of development, an easement in effect reduces the market value from a speculative to a farm production level.Discussions between the landowner and the conservation organization usually focus on two areas: the price, and changes in the use and character of the covered parcel that the easement will allow. One area of landowner concern was the time it took in some cases to negotiate and complete a transaction. Various factors can complicate and lengthen the process: disagreements over price that require more than one appraisal, landowner consultations with attorneys or consultants, or delays until the land trust receives the funds to close the deal. One landowner in Yolo County, who purchased a parcel after the easement was in place, had no idea that he wouldn’t be able to build a home because of specific restrictions named in the deed. Landowners suggested that programs should seek ways to clarify and expedite easement negotiations and terms.

They felt that if programs provided complete information upfront, and made sure purchasers understood the easement terms including the conditions of monitoring and use restrictions, misunderstandings and negative feelings would be reduced. The most frequent sticking point seemed to be the construction of additional residences or farm outbuildings. Landowners wanted the flexibility to house family members or farm workers. Several landowners expressed the opinion, when asked if they would participate again, that they would revise their easement deeds to provide more flexibility for family housing. This included the location, size and number of buildings allowed. While the conservation organization generally tries to tailor these terms as closely as possible to the expressed needs of individual landowners, we found that some organizations were more lenient than others in defining the parameters of an easement.Contact between the landowner and the conservation organization does not end at completion of the easement transaction. The easement terms require that the relationship continue indefinitely to ensure that landowners adhere to the restrictions that have been placed on the property. Program staff or volunteers periodically monitor the uses and conditions of the property, typically through annual site checks and other forms of data collection. Monitoring of easements was controversial among some of those we interviewed. Of the 33 respondents who commented on the subject, 14 reported negative experiences or perceptions of the process. Landowners do not like intrusions on their property regardless of whether they agreed to them on paper. Landowners suggested that programs monitor easement-restricted parcels as a cooperative rather than adversarial process. They suggested that the personnel responsible should be sensitive to local circumstances,rolling benches be knowledgeable about local agricultural practices and provide more practical assistance with improving land management practices.Easements are unquestionably a flexible tool for advancing the individual, family and business goals of farmland owners, as suggested by the owners who sold easements in three California counties. They liked the economic and conservation benefits of the transactions, and were largely positive about the negotiations and other experiences with conservation agencies. Nonetheless, while the easement programs seemed to work for farmers in the northern Bay Area counties and Yolo County, it’s not clear that they will appeal to landowners in other parts of the state and, in particular, the agriculturally rich Central Valley. This region differs from the three counties we surveyed in having a greater diversity of agricultural crops, no coastal zones to justify the protection of farmland as open space, less apparent community support for land preservation programs and perhaps a more conservative agricultural community.We captured a snapshot of vineyard worker satisfaction in 2018; some employers had already adopted strategies to improve job satisfaction and some had not, which may account for some of the variability in the levels of satisfaction among workers.

Future studies may seek to evaluate which strategies are most effective by assessing changes in worker perceptions before and after the introduction of new practices, using tools such as the AJSS.In addition to reducing turnover, improving job satisfaction can also increase work performance and worker health outcomes.Therefore, the satisfaction categories that did not predict turnover should not be dismissed, as dissatisfaction in these areas can contribute to other negative consequences.The AJSS tool overall proved reliable, but it contains four categories with low reliability that require further adjustment and retesting in future studies.In the long term, we are confident that adoption of this tool by the industry could support improvements in productivity, worker health and happiness, and promote the sustainability of the agricultural workforce.Prior to European contact, the Hawaiian Archipelago supported a diversity of highly intensive agricultural systems—in keeping with the high degree of social and cultural complexity of Hawaiian society , and the exceptional environmental heterogeneity of the islands.The most widespread of these agricultural systems have been separated into two major classes—irrigated pond fields in which taro was the major crop, and rainfed uplands based on sweet potato , dryland taro, and yams.Pond Fields were established earlier in Hawaiian history; there is clear evidence for their existence by AD 1200 , and organized systems of pond fields were developed by AD 1400.In contrast, rainfed systems largely developed after AD 1400, and show evidence for increased intensification after AD 1650.These two classes of agro-ecosystems have profoundly different environmental requirements, and they were distributed unevenly across the archipelago at the time of European contact.Pond Fields depend upon reliable sources of irrigation water and gentle slopes; they were developed extensively in well-watered alluvial and colluvial soils.Streams develop and the cumulative effects of erosion and sediment deposition increase with increasing rainfall and substrate age across the Hawaiian archipelago—and consequently pond fields largely were restricted to older northwestern islands, and to the oldest and wettest portions of the younger southeastern islands.In contrast, intensive rainfed systems require at least moderate rainfall and relatively fertile soils.Soil fertility on stable geomorphic surfaces decreases with increasing rainfall and substrate age ; hence, rainfed systems developed primarily in leeward portions of the younger Hawaiian Islands, in environments very different from irrigated pond fields.The spatial and environmental separation between these two modes of intensive agricultural production could have played a substantial role in the dynamics and interactions of Hawaiian societies occupying the younger versus older islands in the archipelago.Despite the opposing nature of the conditions favoring irrigated and intensive rainfed systems, examples of what appear to be integrated systems including both the modes have been reported in valleys on older islands in the archipelago, with irrigated pond fields in valley bottoms and dryland agricultural features on lower slopes just above them.