My family has owned and farmed land in Santa Barbara County since 1840 and on the Gaviota coast since 1866. I grew up in an old wooden farmhouse overlooking Refugio Beach and lived there until I was 20 in 1950. Our family has worked with other coastal ranching families, the Ortegas, Hollisters, Alegrias, Rutherfords, Dotys, Parks, Freemans, Pedottis and others for up to six generations.

When my husband and I had our children, they spent most of their growing-up years on our ranch, working with cows, raising orphan calves, riding horses, fixing fences. They learned about the natural world and about how they fit into the whole system, raising animals and food. As farmers and ranchers, they understand much about the cycle of life because they are part of it.

I remember vividly when the California highway department took the entire homestead from our ranch at Refugio. It was taken by eminent domain to widen the freeway and build the beach entrance. They brought in bulldozers and destroyed the farmhouse, garages, barn, blacksmith shop, granary, corrals and dozens of trees. My son, then 13, did save our old pepper tree, persuading the state not to bulldoze it. It is the largest in California. My daughters and I had nightmares about the rest of our ranch being bulldozed and replaced by condos and shopping centers.

Our experience taught us that our family legacy of farming could be threatened in ways we didn't expect. And it made us realize how important it is to our family to keep our land in farming. Although we couldn't stop the highway department, we could stop private development. So when the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County approached us several years ago, we listened to its ideas. It offered a way to keep our land as a farm by paying us to give up our "development rights" and putting the land into an agricultural conservation easement. The easement guarantees the land will never be developed for urban uses and can remain a working farm in private ownership. They call it a "working landscape" -- which is an accurate term.

When we first talked with the Land Trust, we were afraid it might be negative about farmers and farming. Instead, we found it was flexible and listened to the needs of working farms and ranches. It made sure the easement was reasonable. It allows us to work the ranch in the ways we need to.

I hope other landowners and the community will continue to support the Land Trust's work and be open-minded and flexible with agricultural conservation easements.

There are three newer generations of my family now, younger than I and the three who preceded me here on the Gaviota Coast, and I think about when the youngest will be my age 70 years from now. I feel good knowing they will be able to stand here in Venadito Canyon and see it much as it has been for hundreds of years. Gaviota is the last working coastal landscape in Southern California. There is nothing else like it.

Elizabeth Erro Hvolboll lives in Gaviota.