Family stories bounce around the wide metal barn like BBs as Tommy Clay Jr. and his son, Chance, reminisce about their childhoods on this 2,500-plus acre ranch in Putnam County.
If you couldn’t tell father and son were related by their crinkled-eye smiles or slight southern drawls, the matching grey cowboy hats smudged with dark fingerprints would clue you in.
It’s a cool September morning, but warm enough now that condensation beads on the barn’s sheet metal in sunny spots. Chance perches precariously on a stool with a loose leg while Tommy eases back on a padded office chair.
The land has been in the Clay family since 1858. There are a lot of stories to tell.
There was the Sunday when grandpa dragged a poacher by the collar out of the south pasture, Tommy recalled, and the time a mining company landed a helicopter near the far end of the barn to entice his late mother, Lorene, to sell.
The stories often come back to Lorene: a tough, strong-willed Florida woman. Chance speaks of her with reverent admiration and Tommy with mischievous secrecy, as if she could walk into the barn any minute and scold him for telling tales.
It was Lorene who facilitated a bidding war between rival mining companies over a piece of this land, but also her who stopped it. And it was a family trust, in her name, that preserved the land forever.
As subdivisions spread like ink stains on maps of rural Florida and a growing number of farmers and ranchers reach retirement age, some agricultural families, the Clays included, lock in their land by selling its development rights.
These taxpayer-funded purchases, known as “conservation easements”, keep the crops growing but the earthmovers away. There’s a long list to sign up.
Aging farmers and fragmented farmland
From the sprawling corn fields of Suwannee County to small citrus orchards on Alachua County back roads, about 92% of Florida farms are family owned. The farmers who work these lands average 59 and a half years old, according to the most recent Census of Agriculture.
Put together, those data points spell foul news for family farms.
“ Within the next couple decades, a huge population or percentage of our farming community is going to retire,” said Kalyn Waters. University of Florida Extension Director for Holmes County and daughter of ranchers herself.
Historically, the next generation would take over. But waning profits and interest in other careers increasingly chase young people off the land. Agricultural groups make special efforts to recruit and support young farmers, but trouble can still come if one sibling stays and the others leave.
“Maybe it's been talked about that, you know, Junior's going to take over the ranch because everybody else has moved to town and gotten a job, but there's no formality in that,” Waters said. Facing a profitable “city” career and a share of family land with ever-growing value, it’s hard to say no when developers call.
Subdivisions, solar arrays and storefronts replaced 72,000 acres of agricultural land in Florida last year, about three times the size of Walt Disney World, which itself paved over orange groves and cattle ranches.
If the pace continues, the state could lose a Magic Kingdom-sized swath of farmland each day by 2070, according to research by the UF Center for Landscape Conservation Planning and nonprofit 1000 Friends of Florida.
Promising no development
It’s a little warmer in the barn now, and a black lab named Rosie nuzzles Chance’s feet as his father explains the family’s approach to avoiding sibling disputes.
“My granddaddy was an only child,” Tommy says. “My mother's an only child. I was an only child. Chance is an only child.”
“I broke the mold and had two daughters,” Chance admits sheepishly. “When I was younger, I told dad, I said, ‘When I start having children, I'm gonna create a workforce.’”
He changed those plans after seeing agricultural families split apart as land moved through generations, Chance explains. “I said, no, one or two is enough.”
Chance’s daughters, six and nine years old, love the horses, cattle and adventure they find on great-grandma’s ranch. They’re free to follow in their father’s footsteps or pursue a “big city” job, Chance says: the land is protected either way.
The Clay family sold their property’s development rights to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services for about $2.9 million in 2017. That conservation easement allows the family to maintain a working cattle ranch and blueberry farm but prevents sand mining, water pumping and any other type of non-agricultural development.
Development rights can’t be recovered after they’re sold and, if the Clay family sells the property, the new owners will be bound to the same ag-only terms.
For the Clay family, getting an easement took 12 years.
Lorene, Tommy and Chance initially applied for an easement through the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. When the 2007 recession dried up the program’s funding, “we were all dressed up with no place to go,” Tommy said.
The Department of Agriculture offered a path forward, but the family felt its appraisal of the ranch was too low. Staff determine how much a state agency will pay for an easement by comparing the property’s value with and without its development rights. Some programs offer 100% of the difference while others pay a smaller share and rely on the landowners to “donate” the rest.
“I totally understand everybody wants to stretch a dollar as far as it can go,” Chance said of the department’s first offer, “but if you're going to give up your mineral or development rights, you need to be reimbursed at top dollar.”
After all, the property had other bidders.
The mining company next door and one in South Florida eyed an 800-acre piece of the land and offered to pay a prime rate for it.
As Chance drove agriculture department staff around the property for a second appraisal, mining crews drilled core samples. The agency’s second easement offer came back higher.
The Clay family accepted.
Looking out onto a quiet, rippling lake down a grassy hill from the barn, Tommy and Chance agree they made the right choice.
They could’ve lived in the Bahamas, the two joke, “but no, we chose to go here, get cow manure all over you, in your mouth, this, that, and the other. Break both wrists in the cow pen, that's the route we chose,” Tommy said.
“We want to stay and play cowboy.”
A long waitlist
Conservation easements cover more than 3,400 properties in Florida, according to a 2025 assessment of conservation lands from the State Office of Economic and Demographic Research, but the mix of federal programs, state agencies and private organizations that manage them complicates the count.
Florida residents fund conservation through a portion of a tax on documents like deeds and mortgages. The Florida Legislature acts like a parent dishing out an allowance between siblings: purchase-focused Florida Forever and easement-centric Rural and Family Lands Protection Program.
The former got the better deal last year, receiving more than double the money allocated for the Rural and Family Lands. The siblings swapped places this year. The Legislature cut Florida Forever’s funding to $18 million, its lowest since 2017, while Rural and Family Lands funding tied for its record of $250 million.
Some environmental groups criticized the tipping of the scales, saying that Florida Forever was a more effective conservation tool because of its outright acquisitions and requirements for public access. But most agreed that both programs need more funding.
“The demand is off the charts,” said Keith Fountain, managing attorney at a Florida firm of the same name specializing in conservation land transactions. “We've got a limited window available here to protect, certainly, our core agricultural and conservation areas in Florida, so we need to be pumping the money into these programs as much as possible.”
The waitlist for Rural and Family Lands is about 430 landowners long. Fountain estimated this year’s funding could cover the first hundred, at most, as rising land values drive up easement costs.
Easements tend to succeed on isolated, rural properties, Fountain explained, but struggle with land on urban fringes. This “transition” land appraises high, making it difficult for agency offers to compete with commercial bids. When conservation offers are low, “I’ve had deals go down the drain,” Fountain said.
Tax breaks make low offers more enticing, but carry their own nuance.
Easements cut property tax in half for working farms and ranches in Florida and eliminate it for conservation land. Rural, low-income counties can apply to offset this tax base reduction with funds from the Florida Legislature. Landowners who donate all or part of the easement’s value can sometimes claim it as a charitable deduction on federal income tax, too, provided it meets a strict definition of “permanent.”
Some people worry that easements in Florida aren’t as permanent as they’re marketed to be, pointing to easements released on 60 acres in Split Oak Forest and on a wildlife preserve donated to a local Audubon chapter in Orange County.
But while certain agency-owned holdings can be undone quietly, their state-owned counterparts require a court order. Environmental attorney Clay Henderson, who has managed more than 100,000 acres of such transactions, said he’s “not aware of any state easement that has been extinguished or even amended,” noting that releasing any easement is “extremely rare.”
University of Utah Law Professor and easement specialist Nancy McLaughlin worries it could become more common as development pressures mount in Florida. “The protections in state law across the country aren't wonderful for conservation easements,” she said. “Florida's are particularly bad.”
In addition to concerns about permanence, some critics of conservation easements say using public tax revenue for private lands creates an equity issue, explained Trace Brooks, managing attorney at Brightside Estate and Elder Law in Georgia.
“I can own land. I can preserve it for open space and I can exclude anyone else from accessing it, but I get a great tax break for that,” he said. “I'm using the land the same way that I would've used it before.”
While that may be true for some landowners, others use the financial boost of an easement to manage land less intensely than they’d have to for a self-sustaining profit.
The case of the pulpwood trees
Zipping around on a silent, electric ATV, Ben Williams narrates a tour with the opposite adjectives you’d expect from a proud forest owner.
The slash pines to the right are “particularly poor trees.” The ones on the left are “terrible.”
“Do you see the big, huge curve and the split on that one?” he asks. “An industrial forest would’ve said ‘oh heck no.’”
In an area with 28-year-old trees: “we'd be fortunate if a third of them would end up going for anything but pulp wood,” he said, the equivalent of using a doctoral diploma as scratch paper.
But Ben and Louann Williams, co-owners of a 3,800-acre tree farm near Palatka, don’t mind. The couple purchased the land from forestry giant Plum Creek (now Weyerhauser) in 2009 and immediately sought a conservation easement.
Florida Forever sealed the deal on two easements for $2.9 million in 2017 and 2020, allowing the family to accept lower margins on their timber harvests while protecting the land from development.
Instead of managing purely for profitable wood, the Williams’ manage for the vibrant orange Gulf fritillary butterflies that parade down forest roads on cool October days; the sweaty hikers who trek along the Florida Trail as it winds through the family’s woods; and the slow, scenic rides the couple takes at sunset, spotting deer, snakes and wild blueberries as they go.
“Forty-six years ago, I was commercial fishing, she was waiting tables and we lived in a little house with no air conditioning,” Ben said. “So if you don't think I pinch myself every morning, you're wrong.”
The family balances hunting leases with Audubon tours, encouraging both groups to think of each other as allies rather than adversaries.
“You're building a constituency for protecting the outdoors and wildlife,” Ben said. Income from hunting leases allows the Williams’ to accept a lower rate of return for their timber, in turn reducing forestry’s footprint.
“As environmentalists, a lot of times we don't like to say the ‘economy’ word. We ought to say the ‘economy’ word first,” Ben said. Conservation funding helps preserve and restore Florida’s natural wonders, he said, which provide crucial ecosystem services like flood control and water purification and attract tourists with an economic impact of several billion dollars per year.
“ I'm 70 years old and I've only got so long to try to fix this thing as best I can and pass it on to the next generation,” he said. The couple’s two daughters love the land, but Ben won’t bind them to it. “You do the conservation easement, you teach them as best you can, and then if they decide it's not something they can do, at least the conservation easement is there,” he said.
From the 7th generation Clay Ranch to the 1st generation Williams Wetlands, “not only are we facing development pressures, but we're facing a changing of the guard,” said Fountain, the Florida lawyer.
Conservation easements ensure as ownership changes, stewardship doesn’t.
