Five Rivers featured on NHPR’s Giving Matters
The Five Rivers Conservation Trust helped Jamie and Heather Robertson place a conservation easement on 417 acres of their Hopkinton dairy farm. The easement, purchased by the town of Hopkinton, allows the land to be farmed, but protects it from being developed.
JAMIE: Bohanan farm consists of about four hundred and forty acres of land along three different rivers.
HEATHER: We’ve been here for over a hundred years. I’m the fourth generation.
JAMIE: At this point we have the fifth generation that’s interested in coming back to the farm.
HEATHER: My husband and I milk two hundred, two hundred and ten cows three times a day. We raise all our own crops. Farming is in the blood I think. Yeah, it takes a little bit of something I think to want to live kind of this hard life.
JAMIE: Over the last four years we’ve gotten a little bit more nervous about whether or not the farm would be able to sustain the land in the long run and Heather’s folks and Heather and I and our children really felt strongly about the fact that we didn’t want to see the land develop no matter what. We chose Five Rivers, it seemed to be very progressive in not just preserving land but preserving commercial agriculture and commercial timber production that went along with it which was extremely important to us.
HEATHER: To me it feels like a responsibility to the past and a responsibility to the future because it is. It’s river bottom land. You don’t come by that very easily and you don’t keep it by putting houses and concrete on it.
