Our competitive Matching Grant Program brings open spaces into urban environments by working with public agencies and nonprofits to protect and enhance local agriculture, community recreation, natural resource restoration, and public access within Sonoma County communities. With partial funding from our Matching Grant Program, the City of Sonoma and the …
Duckworth Family Farms, otherwise known as our Nahmens conservation easement, is an 80-acre organic blueberry farm outside of Sebastopol. The easement was originally acquired in 1999, and Duckworth Family Farms bought the property in the early 2000’s. While the property is the perfect location for growing blueberries, the farm also …
Earlier this month, our GIS Coordinator, Allison Schichtel, and Acquisition Assistant, Curtis Kendall, attended the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. The theme of this year’s conference was See What Others Can’t – in essence, a call to action for GIS practitioners to put their skills to good use in …
Ag + Open Space partners with local organizations to provide innovative programs that get young people outside to explore nature, science, agriculture, and environmental stewardship in their communities. One such program is the TEAM program, which stands for Teaching Environmental and Agricultural Memories. Led by Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District …
On June 17, 2019 our Sonoma Valley Wildlands Collaborative partner Sonoma County Regional Parks completed a 34-acre prescribed burn at the Sonoma Valley Regional Park. The burn area included portions of the Sonoma Developmental Center 3 and Curreri properties, which Ag + Open Space purchased in 2007 and 2014, respectively, …
The Nathanson Creek Preserve is a 0.6-mile creek corridor in residential Sonoma located less than a mile south of the historic Sonoma Plaza and along the east side of Sonoma Valley High and Adele Harrison Middle schools, ending at Nathanson Creek Park. Nathanson Creek starts just east of the Plaza …
2018 was quite a year for Sonoma County as our community continued to recover from the October 2017 fires. While we played an important role in the recovery efforts, we are proud to have also made significant progress on a number of our conservation goals. We invite you to take …
In the wake of the 2017 Sonoma Complex Fires, a group of conservation organizations and land management agencies has teamed up to collaboratively manage vegetation and fuel loads on properties in the Sonoma Valley region. Ag + Open Space is one of the participating organizations, along with Audubon Canyon Ranch, …
Have you seen the flock of sheep grazing along the Laguna de Santa Rosa Trail this summer? Our partners at Sonoma County Regional Parks (Regional Parks) are working with Sweetgrass Grazing to graze a portion of the Laguna Trail, which runs through our Balletto Ranch Conservation Easement and City of …
When Ag + Open Space acquired 461 acres of land from John McCullough in 2009, it came with an interesting old building known as the Pelm House. This was the previous home of the Pelm family, who had moved here from Russia around 1945. At the end of World War …