From Greenline to greenbelt

If the Northern California Regional Land Trust (NCRLT) has its way, the southwest section of Chico’s Greenline will become an unalterable greenbelt made up of agricultural properties forever protected from subdivision and development.

“The mission of the land trust is to strengthen the political line that the Greenline is with some kind of permanent line that is brought about by placing agricultural easements on those properties so they can never be developed,” Tod Kimmelshue, president of the board of directors of the NCRLT, said recently.

Kimmelshue—who “grew up on a family farm in Durham,” where he still lives and farms almonds and walnuts with four siblings who co-own the farm with him—is also a past president of the Butte County Farm Bureau.

“The farming community is pretty pleased with how long the Greenline has held,” he added.

Kimmelshue “grew up valuing agriculture and the farming community,” he said, so it makes sense that his work with the NCRLT involves a concerted effort to “save and protect prime farmland” along southwest Chico’s Greenline from possible parcelization and future development by entering into agricultural-easement agreements with landowners.

Such ag-easement agreements serve as deed restrictions over what can be done with the property; in other words, the property can be used only for agricultural purposes, in perpetuity.

“One of the purposes of the land trust is to purchase the development rights from farmers so the farming property on the southwest side of Chico will stay in farming forever,” Kimmelshue said. “It’s kind of common knowledge that it is some of the finest soil in Butte County and has good water availability through aquifers. The water is only 20 to 30 feet below the surface—versus 200 to 300 feet below, as it is in other parts of California—so it doesn’t cost a lot of money to get it to the surface.”

Southwest Chico’s rich soil, he added, is “very deep and very well-suited for tree crops such as almonds and walnuts.”

Enter George Nicolaus. In the summer of 2011, Nicolaus, a local nut farmer since 1977, sold the development rights to the 146-acre Hegan Lane property he and his wife Connie own and farm along the Greenline to the NCRLT.

“We acquired this property in ’05,” said Nicolaus. “It was second-generation almonds at that time,” which meant that only almonds had been growing there for decades. Unlike row-crop farms, on which crops are rotated often to help eliminate pathogens in the soil, the orchard was long-standing and in dire need of being replanted with a different type of tree so as not to put undue stress on the soil.

Nicolaus decided to replace the almond trees with walnut trees. There were “significant costs,” however, associated with removing the almond trees, preparing the soil to plant walnuts and replanting the orchard, Nicolaus said.

“In the course of all that, back in ’09 I became aware of Northern California Regional Land Trust’s interest in preserving North State agriculture,” said Nicolaus. That’s when he entered into a discussion with the nonprofit to pursue an agricultural-easement agreement for his entire property “with one exception—we reserved space for one home.

“The zoning here is A-20—agriculture, with a 20-acre minimum—so you could have seven 20-acre parcels out here, seven homes out here,” he said. “And ranchettes are often a sought-after home site.” Selling his property’s development rights to the NCRLT helped Nicolaus both with the expense of retooling his orchard and with keeping it from being developed.

“In 35 years, I’ve seen a lot of this land [in southwest Chico] go from productive agriculture to homes. Development pressure would potentially be there [on this property] at some point,” he observed. “The [area’s] combination of climate, well-drained soils and adequate water—those things are a unique combination. Once that land’s converted from agriculture to other uses, such as residential, it’s gone.

“Nor-Cal Regional Land Trust’s willingness to compensate me as a land owner to agree not to develop [my land] seemed like a good trade-off.”

While the purchase of the Nicolauses’ property as an agricultural easement is the NCRLT’s only Greenline acquisition thus far, the organization intends “to build on that parcel of land,” as Kimmelshue put it. The NCRLT is currently “talking with adjoining landowners [about selling their development rights]—a two-year process—and we plan to go all up and down the Greenline to see if we can purchase the development rights.”