 The Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative is a new organization designed to increase effectiveness of its member organizations in Cumberland and York Counties. They recently held an event to illustrate the impact a working farm has on the environment and Roger Burley was there. This is Roger Burley at the Broadturn Farm in Scarborough. This is an event sponsored by the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative, a new organization in its pilot year of 2012 drawing together now nine land conservation organizations in Cumberland and York Counties. We are witnessing and experiencing what a working farm does within the context of land preservation and land trust work. I'm now standing with Jeremy Winterstein of the Scarborough Land Trust and Jeremy is the vice chair of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative and so you're involved with this work and at least two levels but I suspect a whole lot more. So please tell us about this preservation project Jeremy. We're at Broadturn Farm right now and this is a 430 acre property owned by the Scarborough Land Trust. We bought it in 2004 with help from a lot of people and public agencies. The town of Scarborough through their land bond contributed to it. The land from Maine's future board contributed to it. The Maine Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a lot of private donors contributed to this project. So we purchased it in 2004 and it's the land trust's biggest property. We've conserved about a thousand acres to date in Scarborough and we were founded in 1977 and it's just been a great, great project to the land trust to figure out how does the land trust own and manage a farm because our core competency is in protecting land and looking after trails and managing forests and things like that. We now have John Bliss and Stacy Brenner who were formerly a turkey hill farm in Cape Elizabeth and before that they were in Cumberland. They've been on the farm for over five years. We've recently signed a 30-year lease with John and Stacy which was a really big milestone for both us and John and Stacy. It gave us a, it gave both of us a long-term vision for the property or a long-term chance at the property. It gives John and Stacy as farm managers the opportunity to invest in the property, buy a tractor, invest in the irrigation, make the soils better, put money into the buildings and so for them to have a long-term lease has really been helpful. And for us, we couldn't ask for better farmers. They are really good members of the community, they're one of the most more well-respected young farmers in the state in the organic farming community and they're just great ambassadors for both land conservation and farming. Now I'm standing with Paul Austin for the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative but Paul, you are the president of Scarborough Land Trust so tell me about your personal interest in making this a success, obviously it's a land trust coup but what are the challenges, what are the benefits, what excites you most about this? When this property was first purchased, the president of the Land Trust at the time called me one day and said, I think we could make this a real farm and I said in your dreams I had no dream at all that she could possibly find farmers to work on this and we had one false start with some farmers and now we've found I think almost the perfect farmers for this project. They're very community oriented, they're really great farmers, they're very smart businessmen and they're really nice people. I think we're fortunate that we're saving farm soil above anything. Once this was 200 houses it would never be a farm again, there's not a prayer. I think we're really fortunate that it didn't happen on this property but we've been involved with another small farm in Scarborough. I think we're really fortunate now to have Maine Farmland Trust because we're concerned about open space, saving land from development and they're concerned about farming so the combination of the two of us is perfect. There's a conservation easement on the land now or will be and in most ultimate terms if the farm drives up and disappears and everyone leaves the farm buildings ultimately nothing else can happen to this land beyond what the terms of the conservation easement are so that the soil will always be here. You buy this and you protect it and you have it forever and we're never going to have less people around here at least I'd be surprised if we do and there will always be more pressure and you know there needs to be a certain percentage of open space and I don't know what that is but I know that once it's gone it's gone probably forever.