San Benito Agricultural Land Trust

Our principal goal is to protect and preserve agricultural land in San Benito County for food production and also for open space. As a land trust we are also mindful of our role as a responsible steward of lands and easements we hold and are working to sustain these activities.

Our immediate strategy is to seek and receive accreditation with the national Land Trust Accreditation Commission. We are strengthening our policies and procedures. We have formed a Fund Development Committee to increase our fund raising capacity, including increasing our donor base. We sought and received several private, state, and federal conservation grants. We hired our first employee and retained one part-time contractor. We expanded our Board of Directors.

Our hard-working volunteer board members all participate in our committees. We doubled our donor base and continue working to expand on that progress. We publish monthly articles in the San Juan Bautista Mission Village Voice and in the countywide online news site, Benitolink, to inform the public of the importance of agriculture to our County and to raise awareness of various aspects of managing farms and rangelands.

We continue to educate ranchers and farmers about conservation easements. We have protected over 6700 acres of agricultural land and are actively adding to that accomplishment.

In 2018, our Board held a strategic planning retreat and we determined that to be effective we needed to engage part-time contract staff, seek national accreditation through the Land Trust Alliance’s (LTA) program, and engage in public relations activity. We hired two consultants part time for two years. We held a follow-up online strategic planning retreat in July 2020 and reiterated our goals and wrote a new 2-year Strategic Plan. As of January 1, 2021 we have hired one of our consultants as a part-time Executive Director. We have completed LTA requirements and we were accredited in February 2022. We are fortunate to have received several capacity building grants, and we are increasing our fund raising activity so we can retain our employee and contract staff person. We engaged an accounting firm to conduct our first official financial review. In partnership with Trust for Public Land, we will receive title in December 2022 to a 540-acre ranch adjoining our other 522-acre fee title ranch. We completed Phase I and are currently in the final stage of acquiring Phase II of the conservation easements on 50 acres of prime farmland, funded by mitigation funds and state and federal grants.