Governor Terry McAuliffe recently appointed Stephanie Ridder, of Flint Hill, Va., to be the new Chair of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Ms. Ridder grew up in Fairfax County and has lived with her husband, John Beardsley, on their VOF-protected farm in Rappahannock County for the past 34 years. They board horses, raise…
Videos from the Virginia Outdoors Foundation’s March 13, 2014 forum about conservation easements and oil and gas production are now accessible through VOF’s YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/vofonline. The approximately 4.5-hour forum has been divided into three segments, featuring each of the three main presenters: Michael Ward of the Virginia Petroleum Council, Kate Wofford of the…
About 80 people attended a VOF-sponsored forum in Fredericksburg on March 13 to discuss the issue of natural gas extraction on conservation easements. The four-hour forum featured presentations from the Shenandoah Valley network, Virginia Petroleum Council, and Northcentral Pennsylvania Conservancy. Nearly two hours were devoted to questions and comments from the public, including several environmental…
Editor’s note: This piece was published in the February 3, 2014 print edition of the Virginian-Pilot, in response to the paper’s criticism of VOF’s policies about oil and gas extraction on conservation easements. In its January 27 editorial “Conservation, Not Fracking,” the Virginian-Pilot asserted that two years ago the Virginia Outdoors Foundation “changed its easement…
The Virginia Outdoors Foundation conserved 56,697 new acres of open space in 2013 — its fourth-greatest year ever. VOF recorded nearly 200 easements in 62 localities, including a 7,312-acre easement in Halifax County that protects one of the largest contiguous private properties in Virginia east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The property has nearly 10…
The Virginia Outdoors Foundation recently protected its 700,000th acre of open space thanks to a conservation easement donated on a 116-acre Bicentennial Farm in New Kent County. It’s VOF’s second easement in New Kent County. The other easement is on Crawfords State Forest. Silver Hall Farm has been owned and operated by the Binns family…
One of Warren County’s oldest conservation groups recently protected its 150-acre property with a conservation easement donated to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation. For nearly 85 years, the Warren County Chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America has been promoting clean air, soil, woods, waters, and wildlife in the Northern Shenandoah Valley. The chapter’s property…
At its June 26 Board of Trustees meeting, the Virginia Outdoors Foundation approved the designation of a new Special Project Area in Rockbridge and Botetourt counties. The Buffalo Creek-Purgatory Mountain Special Project Area encompasses 178,800 acres bordered on the west by the George Washington National Forest and on the east by the Blue Ridge Parkway….
The Virginia Outdoors Foundation, holder of more open-space easements than any land trust in the nation, has selected Brett C. Glymph, of Springfield, Va., to be the organization’s new Executive Director starting September 1, 2013. Since 2006, Glymph has worked as assistant attorney general in the Real Estate and Land Use Section of the Virginia…
Ed Cook was just a boy when he fell in love with the Bath County farm he now owns. Back then, the property belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Law, who had owned it for 50 years. The young Cook admired the land and dreamed of one day owning a property like it. In 1949, he…