Protecting Agricultural Land

The Environmental Defense Center has worked for years to engage diverse sectors of our community in a dialog related to the long-term preservation of local agriculture and open space, and avoidance of sprawl at the urban/rural interface. As such, EDC was a founding partner of the Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties’ Ag Futures Alliance chapters. In 2013 launched the OPEN (Open-space Preservation and Education Network) Project to convene a broad group of diverse stakeholders, including the Farm Bureau, to work together on ag preservation efforts.

In 2014, EDC released a report entitled Win-Win: In Pursuit of Collaborative Policy Development for Santa Barbara County Agriculture to identify opportunities for ag preservation collaboration among farmers, ranchers, and conservationists. This report helped initiate a productive series of conversations, bringing a broad cross-section of stakeholders together to focus on solutions to our shared challenges.

In 2015, we produced a brochure in an attempt to raise awareness about local food purchasing policies, provide an example of such a successful policy and its underlying values, and encourage community members to urge for adoption of such policies in our area.