There are more than 40 land trusts in Wisconsin. Their shared goal is to serve as environmental stewards by preserving natural spaces. One land trust, Tall Pines Conservancy, based in Waukesha County, pays special attention to protecting farmland.
If recent trends continue, more than 515,000 acres of Wisconsin farmland will be paved over, fragmented or converted to other uses by 2040, according to the American Farmland Trust.
Tall Pines Conservancy has made it its mission to curb that trend.

Over its 25 years of existence, the land trust has protected 2,200 acres. Two hundred thirty of those acres have been farmed by the Zwieg family for seven generations.
Today, Kyle Zwieg and his wife farm as a team. "I think it comes down to just a personal way of life you enjoy. Ultimately, it's [a] thing we really enjoy, especially with our children," he says.
The Zwieg family became the first family farm in Wisconsin to participate in the Wisconsin Purchase of Agricultural Conservation Easements (PACE) program.
Kyle Zwieg remembers going to a meeting to learn about the program with his dad. At the time, they knew nothing about PACE or Tall Pines Conservancy.
"One of my favorite moments was when Joe Zwieg stood up at a meeting and we had said somebody's gotta step forward and do this program, and he stood up and said, 'We'll go first,'" Susan Buchanan recalls. Buchanan recently retired as Tall Pines executive director.
"The best way I've ever had a conservation easement described to me is, if you're a landowner, and you look at your rights as a bundle of sticks. You have a stick that represents the right to hunt, the right to farm or the right to subdivide and sell. We took the right to subdivide or develop and sold that to Tall Pines and the state of Wisconsin in exchange for a designated dollar amount, which means that our farm now—the parcels that we own—can never be developed,” Kyle Zwieg says.

Over time, Kyle Zwieg says their farming methods have become more conservation-minded.
"Focusing on soil health and minimizing soil erosion. We have a cropping practice called no-till, where we're not doing any plowing or disturbance of the soil, so we're leaving the soil biology—soil life—intact from season to season and leaving residue on the surface to minimize erosion and surface runoff or phosphorus pollution," Zwieg says.
In the meantime, Tall Pines Conservancy continues to promote farmland conservation funding. Zwieg currently serves as its board chair.
"From a local standpoint—let's say the western suburbs of Milwaukee—things have changed a lot, and not in a good way. There's a lot less of me now existing in Waukesha, Washington and southern Dodge counties. The development, specifically in Waukesha County, and the loss of farmland has been incredible," Zwieg says.
Susan Buchanan says that's why Tall Pines' work to protect farmland is critical. "Not only for the economy—for the state of Wisconsin, farming and agriculture is a hundred-billion-dollar-plus industry with 470,000 jobs—but also for food security and climate mitigation, like the things that Kyle was talking about with best practices," she says.

Buchanan may have retired, but she says she'll be helping with efforts to refund Wisconsin's PACE program.
"We'd like to see $25 million put toward the PACE program at the state level, and we can match that with federal dollars. There's a window right now where there's a lot of federal dollars available through the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) and similar programs. So, we would have as much as $50 million, and we could protect quite a few farms ... it would yield 500 new jobs and protect 22,000 acres on 92 farms," Buchanan says.
She believes farming is part of Wisconsin's culture. "We gotta keep it," she says.