Acworth land trust donates easement on 63 acres
When Steve Davis needs eggs, he doesn’t go to the grocery store. Instead, he’ll grab a bottle of milk from his small dairy operation and walk over to his neighbor’s house, ready to trade for some of her chickens’ cache. His pantry is stocked with other food born from the surrounding land – maple syrup he taps and refines each spring; fruit or jellies from orchards he began planting over 20 years ago; meat from his Jersey cattle.
For Davis, his wife Barbara, and their three children, living off the land is a viable and desirable existence, not an antiquated notion. They’re not alone. The Davises and six other families live and work the land together in a communal environment, just a few miles from the center of Acworth, in southwestern New Hampshire. The families have partnered to subsist on the 275 acres of land owned by the Cold Pond Community Land Trust, a non-profit organization the Davises established in 2000 to protect open space and promote sustainable agriculture.
“We are a group of average people that have a land protection ethic but not necessarily the resources to do anything about it as individuals,” Davis said. “As a group, we can come together and experiment with this different way of being on the land. It allows people to make their livelihood here and also benefit from the beautiful, natural environment that we have.”
To ensure the land retains the qualities that enable such a holistic lifestyle, Cold Pond Community Land Trust recently donated an easement on 63 acres to the Forest Society, the first parcel of five to be permanently protected from development. Davis, the land trust’s current board president, hopes to place easements on the remaining acreage in stages, as fundraising efforts enable the non-profit to pay off its mortgages. The current easement protects over 1,600 feet of scenic road frontage along Cold Pond Road, as well as two streams that run through the property. About five acres of cultivated fields are used on this parcel, and another 10 will be cleared as future pasture for cattle and other livestock.
Residents of the Cold Pond Community Land Trust share more than pastureland; they also contribute to each other’s quality of life. Like barn raisings of yore, residents meet each week to help one family or another with chores too large to handle alone. According to Davis, it can be “as simple as helping one family split wood or it can be putting up trim on their house … we do everything.” The families, about 20 people all told, also share a potluck dinner every Wednesday night and meet to discuss land trust projects on Mondays.
This ethic of sharing the land, of helping one another, extends beyond the land trust’s residents. Garden Meals is the non-profit’s newest endeavor, which fed 177 low income or disadvantaged children and adults over the course of last summer. Participants spent two hours picking vegetables from plots grown by land trust residents before receiving a hands-on lesson about meal preparation from a nutritionist. After eating, participants were able to take home vegetables leftover from the harvest. The land trust is actively fundraising to continue the program this summer and hopes to build a community center in the next few years to provide more educational opportunities for the public.
Davis is hopeful that the egalitarian lifestyle he shares with the land trust’s residents, and their symbiotic approach to land management will “be able to show other people that maybe this is a possibility - instead of chopping [land] up into little individual pieces, you can take some of the pieces and put them into productive associations.”
For more information on the Cold Pond Community Land Trust, or to make a donation to help in the creation of future easements, please email Steve Davis at cpclt@sover.net, 603-835-2403, or send a donation to:
Cold Pond Community Land Trust
P.O. Box 212
Acworth, NH 03601
