The long-awaited measure to preserve the Community Harvest property on Prospect Hill as agricultural land received its final signatures from members of Harvard’s Conservation Commission and the Select Board this week. An agricultural preservation restriction, or APR, on 70 acres of the Community Harvest Project’s land means it will be kept permanently as farmland.
An APR pays a landowner the difference between the land’s value as farmland and its fair-market value (what a developer would pay for it). In exchange, the landowner agrees to a deed restriction guaranteeing the land will be used only for farming. The cost of the Community Harvest APR was $2.5 million, based on a 2021 state appraisal.
Raising the money for the Community Harvest APR was a joint effort by many groups—the town of Harvard, the Community Harvest Project itself, the Harvard Conservation Trust, the Sudbury Valley Trustees, and the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources. The state agricultural department pledged $1,239,000—nearly half the total amount needed. The remaining funds came from the conservation groups and from grants provided by the Muller Conservation Collaborative Trust and the Stoddard Charitable Trust.
The town of Harvard contributed a total of $400,000 from Community Preservation funds. The last portion of those funds was approved at the May 2022 Town Meeting. But the legal process of establishing the APR was completed only this week.
This story draws on material published in a July 2022 Harvard Press article by Grace Fiori.
