Over the last 47 years, Berks Nature has helped preserve over 11,000 acres of land in Berks County.
During this time, Berks Nature has also taken on new challenges and responsibilities outside of their traditional role as a land trust in response to emerging community needs and values. Today, in addition to our land protection efforts, Berks Nature also manages 4 volunteer-driven watershed associations; offers an expansive array of environmental education opportunities from a summer Eco-Camp to public programs to a fully-licensed Nature Preschool; participates in stream, forest, and meadow restoration projects; and works with farmers to install conservation measures and technology.
Even as Berks Nature’s activities have expanded, we are a land trust at heart and our core focus remains centered on land protection. Since the organization rebranded itself from the Berks County Conservancy to Berks Nature in 2016, we have, on average, helped preserve nearly 370 acres of land per year.
We are proud to remain Berks County’s land trust, helping to protect the County’s rich landscape of natural resources in a variety of ways…
Perhaps the most traditional (and popular) way in which Berks Nature protects land is through conservation easements. A conservation easement is a voluntary legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust or government agency that permanently limits the uses of the land in order to protect its conservation values.
Each easement is different; catered to protect a specific property’s unique natural, agricultural, and cultural features while preventing activities that threaten those resources. But all easements, by sheltering these conservation values, confer benefits to the greater community in the form of clean and abundant water, scenic views, or wildlife habitat, to name a few. Through farmland preservation, easements can even support food security and the rural integrity of a region.
Today, the Berks County Agricultural Land Preservation Program (BCALPP) ranks 3rd in the nation for farmland preservation. But in the early 1990s, opportunities and funding to support these agricultural easements were more limited. Unfortunately, the demand for agricultural preservation among Berks County farms far surpassed the Program’s capacity, resulting in a waitlist of applicants for this popular program.
Edward and Mildred Unterkofler were two such farmers who found themselves on the outside looking in. They owned a 409-acre farm in Centre Township bordered by the Schuylkill River in the east where they raised Black Angus cattle and grew corn, beans, and hay. Along the property’s eastern edge, spring-fed wetlands and narrow tributaries seep and weave through the Schuylkill’s lush, forested floodplain.
To this day, the farm is a bucolic scene underlain by abundantly fertile soils thanks to a conservation easement, which the Unterkoflers donated to Berks Nature (formerly Berks County Conservancy) in 1993.
By removing a property’s development rights, conservation easements can lower the property value of an eased parcel. The owner can either donate this lost value, which can qualify as a tax-deductible donation, or the easement can be purchased, compensating the owner for the loss. Donated conservation easements have long served as a family estate planning tool.
When the Unterkoflers weren’t accepted in the County’s Agricultural Land Preservation Program, which pays farmers for the lost development rights, they instead donated their easement as a symbol of their community’s commitment to agricultural preservation (the Unterkoflers were not the only Centre Township farmers struggling to meet the County Program’s criteria).
By elevating agricultural preservation as a municipal and community priority, the Unterkofler’s donation served as a prime impetus for the creation of the Centre Township Land Protection Easement Program, which, like the County’s program, provides financial incentives to participating farmers.
The Centre Township Land Protection Program is a unique and innovative municipal land protection program in partnership with the County of Berks and the Berks County Agricultural Land Preservation Program and has permanently preserved 4,400 acres of farmland since 2002.
Although Edward and Mildred have since passed away, the protections written into the conservation easement and recorded with the property deed in the Berks County Recorder of Deeds office, remain in effect in perpetuity and apply to all future owners. Their conservation legacy will remain with the land and with the 4,400 acres of protected farmland their donation put into motion.
Berks Nature continues to steward the Unterkofler farm which, nearly 30 years later, remains the largest easement in Berks Nature’s 9,034 acre portfolio of 136 eased properties.
Berks Nature continues to be a land preservation option for agricultural landowners unable to access the Berks County Agricultural Land Preservation Program, for landowners that prefer to preserve their properties with a non-governmental land trust, and for landowners with forests, mixed forest and fields, wetlands, riparian buffers, and cultural resources.
