SALC GRANT

The Ventura County Resource Management Agency – Planning Division and Department of Agriculture/Weights & Measures, in partnership with the Ventura County Farm Bureau and the Nature Conservancy, have been awarded a Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation (SALC) planning grant. On December 14^th, 2021, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors authorized a consultant services contract with Cultivate LLC to develop the Ventura County Agricultural Conservation Planning Strategy (Strategy).

The intent of the SALC program is to protect and maintain existing agricultural lands to avoid conversion to urban development and the attendant increases in greenhouse gas emissions. This will be accomplished through the development of the Strategy. Development of the Strategy will involve three major elements: an economic analysis and risk assessment of Ventura County agriculture, mapping and prioritizing threatened agricultural land for conservation and developing an incentive structure for landowners, and creation of an education and awareness strategy to communicate the value of working landscapes and existing programs that have aligned missions to the Strategy in Ventura County to the general public and to policymakers.

For more information about the SALC program, use this link to the California Department of Conservation’s SALC webpage.

If you’d like to get involved, you can email the consultant team at vcagstrategy@urbanruralstrategies.com, the County at alec.thille@ventura.org, or make comments and utilize the mapping tools at the Ventura County SALC Project Gateway. The Project Gateway is a map-based collaborative platform built to help anyone interested in evaluating and protecting agricultural values in the county to explore, integrate, and contribute data to increase our understanding on how best to achieve a sustainable agricultural future.