Harvesting flowers and produce August 27th Bush Family farm owners Mark and Kathleen Clark along with the Capitol Land Trust announced a conservation easement for Bush Prairie Farm. That will keep 5-acre property as a farm and historic place forever, with no development ever allowed on it.
Five acres of the historic Bush Prairie Farm off Old Highway 99 Southeast near Tumwater will be protected from future development, thanks to a conservation easement that was recently granted to Capitol Land Trust.
The property is where George and Isabella Bush, and their children homesteaded in 1845. More than 500 acres of their land was sold and is now part of the Olympia Regional Airport. Mark and Kathleen Clark bought the Bush Prairie Farm in October 2009.
The conservation easement strips all future development rights from the property.
“Frankly, we’re still pinching ourselves that we were able to get this done,” Mark Clark told The Olympian.
The conservation is a partnership with Lacey-based Capitol Land Trust, the Clarks and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. The total cost of the project was about $170,000, according to Capitol Land Trust Executive Director Amanda Reed. The USDA kicked in $82,500 for the easement, she said.
In June, a matching grant for the project from Thurston County was canceled by the Thurston County Board of Commissioners. Two of the three commissioners were elected in November. All three ran as political independents, and have changed some of the work done by the previous Democrat-majority commission.
“Thurston County had awarded us $75,000 from the Conservation Futures Program, when we started the project in 2014, but then they (the new commission) voted not to give us the funding when we closed on the easement this summer,” Reed said. “We had to scramble at the last minute and luckily were able to raise the funds from private individuals to complete the purchase of the conservation easement.”
The Clarks also made a donation toward the easement, she said.
The Clarks grow vegetables and flowers as a Community Supported Agriculture farm. Bush Prairie Farm also has been the site of an archaeological field school for The Evergreen State College.
The farm’s natural prairie habitat is ripe for the Mazama pocket gopher, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
“They like it there,” Mark Clark said with a chuckle. “They’re very happy.”
He said they’ve learned to live with the critters, planting in ways that keep gopher damage to a minimum, and extra plants, knowing that gophers will take a share or two. They’ve been working with two developers to list their farm as mitigation for construction projects in the area, and the easement is expected to help that process along, he said.
The farm is zoned “light industrial” and until recently Clark said they worried that future owners could use it to build warehouses on the site, and ruin its prairie habitat.
Now, it’s protected from that.
“It cannot be developed — nope, nope,” Clark said. “…It’s now a farm and will stay that way forever.”
