State OKs $300,000 to Save Farmland

A state agency has approved a $300,000 grant to help the Ventura County Agricultural Land Trust buy development rights on a south Ventura farm, a move officials called a first step toward preserving farming as the county’s No. 1 industry.

The California Resources Agency, which is overseeing distribution of $3.3 million in grants to save farmland statewide, recommended this week that the State Coastal Conservancy receive the grant to help the local land trust purchase easement rights to the 135-acre Arundell-Triangle farm.

Because the money is technically part of highway funds, the state Transportation Commission must also sign off on the grant--an action expected in July.

The state grant covers about 20% of the estimated $1.5 million it will take to keep the Ventura property--south of the Ventura Freeway and near Ventura Harbor--as a farm, said Peter Brand, head of the State Coastal Conservancy’s farmland preservation efforts.

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If the Ventura deal is completed, it would represent the first purchase of development rights from a farmer in Ventura County.

“We now have to find the additional funding needed to complete the project,” Brand said. “There are other state and federal funds we hope to secure in the next six months.

To that end, the $300,000 grant is important because it could serve as seed money for other grant applications, said county planner Gene Kjellberg, a director of the agricultural trust, a nonprofit agency formed in 1992 to preserve prime cropland threatened by the expansion of cities.

“I’m ecstatic about this grant,” Kjellberg said. “I think it’s really a first step and is going to be the first of many awards we’re going to be able to secure. This is a very hopeful first step that provides a precedent in Ventura County.”

The conservancy’s Brand said about 50,000 acres have been preserved statewide by buying the right to develop the land from farmers. Most of that has been in Marin and Sonoma counties, but farmland easements have also been purchased by land trusts in San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Solano, Yolo, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, he said.

In Sonoma County, the effort is supported by a voter-approved one-quarter-cent sales tax that provides millions of dollars a year.

A $750,000 federal grant that the Ventura County trust was hoping to get last month was tentatively awarded instead to buy farmland easements in Yolo, Fresno and Monterey counties. But Brand said Ventura County could very well receive part of a second round of grants later this year.

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“Ventura County is the highest priority for the Coastal Conservancy’s farmland program,” Brand said. “And we are very hopeful we will get a grant in the next round.”

Brand said that the Resources Agency’s decision to funnel $300,000 toward preserving a Ventura farm on the edge of urbanization should be seen as an endorsement of recent actions in support of agriculture by the Board of Supervisors and the Farm Bureau.