WASILLA -- Forty acres of hayfields that belong to the Alaska State Fair are now preserved for farming in a nod to the agriculture that founded the fair nearly 80 years ago.
The Alaska Farmland Trust Corp. and state fair board on Monday closed on a deal that places a conservation easement on the fair-owned land across South Inner Springer Loop from the Palmer fairgrounds.
The property sits next to the former Hamilton Dairy Farm, operated since the 1950s. Members of the Hamilton family still lease the parcel and grow hay on it. Under the agreement, the fair retains the right to use it for parking, officials say.
Monday's closing marks the end of about seven years of negotiations that started when fair officials contemplated selling the Hamilton land for a major industrial training campus.
"This has been a long time coming for us," said Todd Pettit, a Lazy Mountain hay farmer who sits on the Farmland Trust board.
Fellow board member and Palmer potato farmer Ben Vanderweele was getting ready Monday morning to go down to the title company and hand a check to fair board president John Harkey for the development rights on the parcel.
"The 40 acres we're trying to save is very visible," Vanderweele said. "To put it bluntly, we're just trying to keep it away from the subdividers, the developers."
The actual amount on that check was $641,181, according to Harkey. And on top of that, the fair contributed $223,900 plus about $30,000 in stewardship and other fees. The total contract sale was for $895,600, Harkey said.
The farm board several years ago passed a resolution to pay a quarter of the total cost, he said. "To help push the process along, because we are involved in the farm community, we decided we'd knock 25 percent off."
Former fair manager Ray Ritari -- his last day was Friday -- was instrumental in the land preservation process, several people involved said.
The money from the development rights will allow the fair, a nonprofit, to make improvements and upgrades, Harkey said. Nothing's been earmarked yet, he said. "Things like this can be unbelievably helpful."
The Mat-Su Farm Bureau contributed $1 for every "Alaska Grown" T-shirt and hoodie sold and the Palmer Soil and Water Conservation District provided some money, Vanderweele said.
The farmland trust received about half the amount from the Legislature several years ago, Pettit said. The Natural Resources Conservation Service provided the rest.
The push to save the Hamilton land began around 2008 when fair officials started negotiating with Palmer-based Northern Industrial Training to put a $24 million training campus on the property. That galvanized action in the farm community; Matanuska Valley colonists founded the fair more than 70 years ago to showcase produce and animals.
An outcry followed, with dozens of people pressing the fair to conserve the land and find another site for the training campus. The fair in 2009 scrapped the sale plans and offered NIT another site.
The Alaska Farmland Trust has been involved with other Valley parcels, including its first conservation easement on the 40-acre Heaven farm on Fairview Loop Road near Wasilla and an 80-acre easement along Palmer-Fishhook Road.
The Hamilton transaction comes as many in the farming community -- particularly in Palmer -- are exploring the idea of creating some kind of farmland land bank to conserve remaining high-quality soils that are increasingly surrounded by subdivisions.
Conservation easements can change a property's valuation for tax purposes but the fair is a nonprofit corporation that doesn't pay property taxes anyway, officials there say.