On a surprisingly brisk September morning, the just-risen sun cast its warmth over a line of young cottonwood trees and a fallow field. Steps away, greens burst from the ground in perfect alignment, a hint to the rows of carrots, lettuces and onions growing below. Homes bordered the scene on three sides.
Green spaces like this aren’t unusual in northern Colorado. The Fort Collins area is home to 52 natural areas, equaling about 55,000 conserved acres. People often think of these sites as places to hike or bike or spot wildlife (think: the bison herd at Soapstone Prairie Natural Area). But when Kestrel Fields Natural Area opened to the public last month, it marked a new approach to the city’s efforts: Open space that doubles as farmland. It’s the third piece of a pilot project that’s using agriculture as a way to achieve land conservation goals.
Colorado is set to lose more than 415,000 acres of farm land and ranch land by 2040, according to American Farmland Trust, a national nonprofit. Larimer County is among the three counties most likely to have those landscapes paved or otherwise converted.
“Agriculture is one of our conservation values,” said Julia Feder, environmental planning manager for the city of Fort Collins Natural Areas. “It’s a huge part of Colorado’s heritage.”
In 2020, the city partnered with Poudre Valley Community Farms (PVCF), a nonprofit focused on connecting food producers with affordable land in order to make it easier to grow food locally. The goal: Determine if agriculture could help achieve conservation benchmarks, such as improving soil quality, restoring plant life, supporting wildlife habitats and reducing water use.
“Once you put concrete over a piece of ground, you can’t go back,” said PVCF executive director Stacy Lischka. “You also lose the value of that land for conservation goals, for open-space goals, for climate adaptation. It’s really important both for giving folks opportunities to run these small businesses and it helps to preserve open space and the agricultural history in Colorado.”
PVCF began as a co-op nearly a decade ago when two farmers felt they were out of options. Nic Koontz started Native Hill Farm in 2009. His now-wife, Katie Slota, came onboard soon after. In its first decade, Native Hill was forced to relocate five times. “The uncertainty of it was definitely difficult,” Slota said. “With farming, you only get one chance a year. It’s not like baking bread where you’re like, ‘Oops, I burned the bread, I’ll just bake another batch.’ It’s definitely important to have continuity year after year on your soil.”
The pair approached some people they knew in the community about their struggles, and PVCF, which has since transitioned into a nonprofit, was born.
The five-year pilot program with Fort Collins blends the city’s focus on conserving and restoring landscapes with PVCF’s efforts to find affordable lands for conservation-minded farmers to work. (PVCF leases parcels of the city-owned land and then sub-leases them to farmers.) “Natural areas can be all sorts of things to all sorts of people, and this is just one more extension of that idea, especially these areas that are in town and close to town,” Lischka said. “This is something very different. It’s not the way Natural Areas has managed land before.”
At Kestrel Fields, that meant turning a water-intensive hay field into Native Hill’s 25-acre, working vegetable farm. Koontz and Slota are planting pollinator-supportive varieties to help rebuild important populations of butterflies and bees. Native shrubs were added to act as a windbreak to support the city’s restoration efforts and offer protection for the farm. A recently opened perimeter trail — an unusual site on a working farm — provides public access to the outer edges of the property.
Kestrel Fields is one of three pilot sites. The other two are 150-acre Flores del Sol Natural Area, which hosts vegetable crops and grazing animals and acts as a business accelerator to help farmers get up and running with education and equipment support, and a parcel adjacent to Cathy Fromme Prairie Natural Area, where grazing by goat, sheep and cattle is supporting the grasslands and reducing wildfire risk. The effort is supporting 10 farmers in total; both PVCF and the city hope the outcomes support expanding the program in the future.
Though data is still being collected, the results three years in are encouraging. Meadowlarks are returning and using Kestrel Fields as nesting grounds. Water use on the property is down 70 percent. More butterflies and bees are appearing. And PVCF farmers donated around 15,000 pounds of food to the Food Bank for Larimer County last year.
On that cold September morning, as Koontz fired up his tractor for the day’s tasks, neighbors walked by with their leashed dogs. Kids would soon bike by on their way to school. For the first time, Koontz and Slota have access to a longer-term, five-year lease at an affordable rate, which has allowed them to grow their business.
“As a farmer, we’ve seen a lot of the land, the beautiful farmland that surrounds our community, be changed into houses or changed into gravel pits — exchanged for things you can’t really get back as far as agriculture goes,” Slota said. “[This project is about] making sure that the public understands that we can have both agriculture and natural areas in one space and that working landscapes are an important part of our community.”
