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SACRAMENTO -- Capay
Valley Vision, Inc., a newly established
non-profit organization dedicated to
charting a course for the future of that
rural part of Yolo County, has received
a $30,000 grant from the California
Department of Conservation.
Capay Valley Vision
plans to use the grant to produce an
atlas documenting regional resources,
demographics, infrastructure, needs and
relevant economic trends within three
months. It then will use focus groups
and discussions with concerned parties
to develop a community action plan and
implementation strategy by September
2002.
"Helping Capay Valley
citizens envision the future for this
productive agricultural area is a very
worthwhile undertaking," DOC Director
Darryl Young said.
Capay Valley Vision
is a collaboration of local farmers and
ranchers, Native Americans and other
community residents. Partner
organizations include the Cache Creek
Conservancy, Rumsey Indian Rancheria,
the Yolo County Resource Conservation
District, the County of Yolo and the
Yolo Land Trust.
At the core of Capay
Valley Vision's mission are the desires
to preserve farmland and increase the
sustainability of regional agricultural
enterprise. As part of its community
action plan, the organization might
attempt to enhance the marketing of
Capay Valley produce, just as Apple Hill
growers market their fruit or Napa
Valley growers their grapes. Other
possible steps could include devising
ways to encourage additional smaller
scale and organic farming operations to
relocate in the valley while
discouraging the breakup of farms into
rural ranchettes and estate housing.
One way to promote
farming is the creation of agricultural
conservation easements. That is the
focus of the California Farmland
Conservancy Program, the source of the
state's grant to Capay Valley Vision.
The CFCP, administered by the Department
of Conservation's Division of Land
Resource Protection, provides grants
that enable local governments and
non-profit organizations to work with
landowners to voluntarily remove the
development potential on their farmland,
thus creating permanent conservation. Up
to 10 percent of CFCP grant funds are
available for projects which develop
policy or planning oriented to
agricultural land protection, and for
improvements to land already under an
agricultural conservation easement (for
example, erosion control or riparian
area improvements).
Yolo County ranked
23rd among California's 58 counties in
2000 with nearly $303 million in gross
agricultural production. Tomatoes,
grapes, rice, hay, seed crops and corn
are the county's leading commodities. At
the same time, the county's population
is growing rapidly. Yolo County's
population in 2000 was about 169,000; by
2020, according to Department of Finance
projections, the population will be more
than 262,000.
"We believe that
Capay Valley Vision has an outstanding
plan to set the stage for an integrated
regional planning strategy that will
have significant community support,"
Young said. "In addition to ultimately
leading to more long-term farmland
protection, the work being planned could
prove a valuable model for other rural
areas that are working with Native
American communities to balance farmland
conservation with casino development."
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