[Scpg] SF Gate: Greens buy a farm/In a controversial move, a conservation group has bought 9,200 acres of Delta farmland

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Hi everyone
	I like this story below, gives us ideas how to start to Farm so that we 
are taking care of all life plant and animal well growing food. Survival of 
all should not create the conflicts we have in farming within the living world
									wes
  TNC to try its' hand at farming.
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This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/12/05/MN211182.DTL
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Wednesday, December 5, 2001 (SF Chronicle)
Greens buy a farm/In a controversial move, a conservation group has bought 
9,200 acres of Delta farmland
Glen Martin, Chronicle Environment Writer


    Staten Island, Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta -- This entire
9,200-acre island is a corporate farm, annually pumping out hundreds of
thousands of bushels of corn, wheat and tomatoes. There are no groves of
hoary oaks, no native bunch grass uplands, no marshes.
    It's not the kind of property, in other words, that tends to excite
conservationists.
    And yet, some conservationists are excited -- specifically those who work
for the California Nature Conservancy, an organization that usually buys
and preserves large tracts of the state's most endangered ecosystems.
    In a controversial move, the conservancy has purchased Staten Island with
a $35 million government grant. The organization doesn't plan to restore
the island to wetland and riparian forest, as some conservationists would
have them do; it's going to farm it.
    The grant was administered by CalFed, a joint state and federal agency
that was formed several years ago to guarantee an equitable split of the
state's water among urban, environmental and agricultural interests.
CalFed also restores wildlife habitat and fisheries in the Sacramento and
San Joaquin rivers and their shared delta.

    Chris Unkel, a senior field representative for the conservancy,
acknowledges that the move "pushes the envelope" of conservation theory.
But that strategy, he says, is dictated by necessity.
    Wildlife cannot be protected by simply buying discrete parcels of pristine
habitat, in part because there isn't enough left, Unkel says. Instead,
wildlife has to be encouraged on land that is farmed or otherwise
developed to one degree or another.
    Wildlife already thrives to a very significant degree on the ranch. Up to
20,000 sandhill cranes spend the winter on Staten Island, as well as
hundreds of thousands of waterfowl and shorebirds.
    The conservancy will maximize the wildlife carrying capacity of the farm
through such techniques as flooding harvested fields to create the kind of
habitat that migratory birds like, Unkel said.
    "This is basically going to be a demonstration farm," Unkel said, as he
inspected the property on a recent cold and blustery day. "We intend to
show you can have both wildlife and a viable agricultural operation."
    But some environmentalists are uneasy about the conservancy's bold new
move,
    saying that the organization has strayed dangerously far from its original
mandate of identifying, buying and protecting threatened wildlands.
    Further, they say, the use of public funds to buy a commercial enterprise
for a private organization -- even a nonprofit organization like the
Nature Conservancy -- is wrong.
    "If an asset is purchased with public money, that asset should be retained
for the public," said Huey Johnson, a former executive director of the
California Nature Conservancy, a past state resources secretary and the
president of Defense of Place, a Marin County environmental organization.
    "That certainly isn't the case with this acquisition," Johnson said.
"There'll be virtually no public access."
    Johnson also questioned the conservancy's comfortable relationship with
large landowners and government regulatory agencies.
    "A primary responsibility of environmental organizations is to criticize
government, thereby keeping government honest," he said. "It has been a
long time since the conservancy has criticized anything government has
done. They're seemingly more concerned about money -- about picking up
huge blocks of land at public expense."
    But Unkel countered that the Nature Conservancy has never been a
litigious, or even confrontational, organization. Historically, he said,
the group has sought consensus.
    "We've always maintained cordial relationships with landowners and the
agencies," he said, noting that the group has preserved more than 1
million acres of land in California. "That's how we're able to get things
done."
    Deals like Staten Island, Unkel said, are essential if wildlife is to
thrive on a landscape-size scale rather than in isolated pockets.
    "There simply isn't enough money to buy all the land you would need to
accommodate migratory waterfowl, for example," he said. "If we can't get
farmers to sign on to wildlife-friendly farming, we're in trouble. And
they aren't going to sign on unless they're sure they can run a profitable
operation."
    Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation,
concurred with Unkel, and said cropland can be excellent wildlife habitat.
    "Well-managed farmland can be even better habitat than land taken out of
(crop) production," he said. "Without flooded rice and corn fields, you'd
have a lot of hungry waterfowl in this state. Wildlife agencies often have
enough money to buy land, but not enough to manage it. If you can keep the
owner producing on the land and work with him to maximize wildlife value
-- that's your best scenario."
    For some environmentalists, the most troubling aspect of the Staten Island
deal is its financial structure.
    "Essentially, this is a very specialized kind of conservation easement --
a commercial use of a property with certain management strictures that
benefit the environment," said Carl Pope, the executive director of the
Sierra Club.
    "From that basic perspective, this seems like a pretty good deal," Pope
said. "But when you buy such an easement, the price is invariably less
than the purchase price for the property. So you have to ask if the return
to the public is fair in this case. It seems like the state should have
bought the land, then sold it to a farmer with an environmental easement,
or perhaps leased it to the conservancy. I'm not sure it's appropriate for
the conservancy to own this property and run it for a profit."
    Unkel said that Staten Island will be managed for wildlife more than for
maximum monetary return and that all profits will be plowed back into farm
operations.
    From a larger perspective, said the Farm Bureau's Dave Kranz, anything
that keeps farms producing crops must be considered a public benefit.
    "County revenue in rural areas can be severely impacted when croplands are
taken permanently out of production and put into preserves," he said.
"It's getting to be a real problem."
    Patrick Wright, the director of CalFed, said he feels there is little
merit to the argument that government funds should be used only for the
purchase of lands open to the public.
    "There are plenty of cases where environmental organizations have bought
land and excluded the public from it," Wright said. "It all depends on the
specific goals of each project."
    And, Wright added, social realities must also be taken into consideration.
People in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, he noted, have
perspectives that are different from those of Bay Area residents.
    "The fact of the matter is that we can't afford to displace the
agricultural community in the Central Valley," he said. "We don't have the
money, and we certainly don't have the political support. The only
reasonable option is forge collaborative partnerships with agriculture for
projects with multiple benefits. Staten Island is a case in point."

    E-mail Glen Martin at glenmartin at sfchronicle.com.
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Copyright 2001 SF Chronicle