Urban expansion is an important driver of farmland loss in the United States. In response, many governments have adopted land-use policies designed to slow the conversion of farmland at the urban fringe to other uses, including public conservation easement programs. Such policies are difficult to evaluate, as decisions to convert farmland to urban land are not made independently of decisions to enact conservation easement policies. Using Northern Virginia as a study area, this study employed pair matching as a quasi-experimental approach to disentangle the impact of conservation easement policies from other drivers of land-use change. Changes in the relative amount of farmland cover between counties with public conservation easement policies and those without were analyzed in order to establish the extent to which such policies increase the likelihood of land being used as farmland. The results did not indicate any significant change in land-use as the result of the implementation of conservation easement policies, suggesting that such policies should not be relied on to protect farmland from urbanizing pressures.
Ben Simon (Sun,) studied this question.