Twenty-four acres off Ridgefield's edge just became a forever farm
April Joy Farm is the first agricultural property in Clark County permanently protected through the county's Legacy Lands program. In a town where the median home price has jumped 147 percent in a decade, that is a bigger deal than it sounds.
Here is the sentence I did not expect to write during a summer of groundbreakings, roundabout construction and yet another subdivision sign going up on a road I used to think of as rural: a piece of Ridgefield farmland is now permanently, legally, forever a farm. Not until the market turns. Not until somebody's kids sell it. Forever.
On Tuesday, July 21, Washington Farmland Trust announced it had placed a conservation easement on April Joy Farm, the 24-acre certified organic farm that April and Brad Thatcher run just outside town. It is the trust's first project in Clark County. It is also the first time the trust has partnered with Clark County's Legacy Lands program, and the first farmland conservation easement the program has ever funded.
Three firsts in one announcement, which is a lot of firsts for 24 acres. But that is sort of the point. Somebody had to go first.
The file on this one
What April Joy Farm actually is
If you have shopped a farmers market or eaten at a restaurant around here that name-drops its growers, you have probably eaten this farm's food without knowing it. April Joy is a diversified direct-market family farm — annual and perennial crops, certified organic by the Washington State Department of Agriculture, with heritage-breed livestock, a flock of laying hens and a topography that includes canyon, creek and cropland. Not a hobby operation. This is the Thatchers' full-time livelihood.
The farm also runs Farm to Heart, a food equity initiative that connects local growers with families dealing with food insecurity. That work is fiscally sponsored by Tilth Alliance, and it is a genuinely meaningful chunk of what happens on those 24 acres.
April herself has a civil engineering degree and an M.B.A., which explains a lot about how methodically this easement came together. She picked up the Organic Trade Association's National Organic Farmer of the Year leadership award in 2023, and she currently chairs the board of the Organic Farming Research Foundation. She also, and I love this, once ran the first Animal Welfare Approved pork operation in the Pacific Northwest. The farm's logo is a pig named Rosie who lived to 13 and had strong feelings about apples. That is the level of local lore we are dealing with.
Her own account of why she started the farm in the first place is blunt: she couldn't stand to watch land like this become "a casualty of urban sprawl". Twenty years later, she did something about it permanently.
Why 24 acres is a big number here
Context is everything on this story. According to Washington Farmland Trust, the median home price in Ridgefield has climbed 147 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, the trust puts the drop in Clark County's agricultural acreage at nearly 40 percent since 2017. Read those two numbers next to each other and the whole thing snaps into focus. Land here is worth more with houses on it than with food growing on it, and that math beats sentiment every single time unless somebody changes the math.
The soil is the part that gets me. A county agricultural lands study cited on April Joy Farm's own site found that 96 percent of Clark County farmland — roughly 31,400 acres — is formally classified as Prime Farmland or Farmland of Statewide Importance. This is not average dirt. Ridgefield's agricultural history runs through prunes, pears and berries, and the ground that grew them is the same ground currently going under foundations.
That is April, quoted in the trust's announcement, and it is the crux of it. You can build a park anywhere. You can plant a street tree anywhere. You cannot manufacture centuries of topsoil at the headwaters of a salmon stream, and once a subdivision is sitting on it, that is the end of the conversation.
Which brings up the other reason the county cared about this particular parcel: Whipple Creek. The farm sits at its headwaters, and the creek feeds the Columbia and carries salmon. Protecting how those 24 acres get managed is a watershed decision as much as a farmland decision, and watershed health is squarely in the Legacy Lands wheelhouse.
The part where somebody has to go first
Nate Lewis, a senior conservation manager for Washington Farmland Trust, framed the Clark County partnership as exactly the kind of work the organization exists for: protecting high-quality farmland in places that are developing fast. The trust has been at this statewide since 1999 and has now conserved 38 farms and more than 4,000 acres. April Joy is its first here.
On the county side, Legacy Lands program coordinator Denielle Cowley described the easement as a next step for the program and said the county is looking to work with more local farmers on preserving agricultural land. That is not boilerplate. It is a county employee saying, on the record, that there is an appetite for the next one.
April has said she hopes the project inspires other farmers to protect what's left of Clark County's farmland. Three years of paperwork is a long time to spend building somebody else's on-ramp. If you own ground out here and you have ever thought about what happens to it after you, there is now a version of that story with a known ending.
Common questions
Can I go visit the farm?
Not as a public site, no. April Joy Farm is a private working farm and this easement does not change that. The best way to support it is through Farm to Heart or by buying its produce — check apriljoyfarm.com for current channels rather than showing up at the gate.
Does "permanent" really mean permanent?
Yes. A conservation easement is recorded against the property title and runs with the land, so it binds future owners too. If the Thatchers ever sell, the buyer buys a farm that has to stay a farm.
Did taxpayers pay for this?
In part. The easement was funded through Clark County's Legacy Lands program, which draws on the Conservation Futures property tax levy. Washington Farmland Trust holds and stewards the easement.
I own farmland near Ridgefield. Where do I start?
Two doors. Clark County's Legacy Lands program at clark.wa.gov, and Washington Farmland Trust at wafarmlandtrust.org. Expect it to take a while — this one took about three years — and expect it to be worth it.
Is more Ridgefield farmland going to get protected?
Nobody has announced a next project. But both the trust and the county said out loud that they hope this leads to more, and the county has now proven it can fund one. Watch this space.
More from Meanwhile in Ridgefield
I moved here from New Jersey, where "open space" mostly means the median on the parkway, so watching this town wrestle with its own growth is something I take personally. We are going to keep getting new houses, new schools and new roundabouts, and most of that is fine and some of it is genuinely good. But the ground that feeds us is not renewable, and 24 acres of it just got a permanent answer. If you know a farmer out here, tell them this happened. If you are a farmer out here, you know who to call.
