The Georgia fields where former President Jimmy Carter once grew peanuts will soon become public.
The Conservation Fund, an environmental nonprofit, announced Nov. 9 that it bought Carter’s 2,500-acre family farm for about $8.5 million. The group plans to turn the land over to the state of Georgia by 2028 to expand the nearby Lanahassee Creek Wildlife Management Area.
"We're opening it for future people to come out ... to make that same connection to the land that he made many years ago," said Stacy Funderburke, vice president of The Conservation Fund’s southeast region.
The farmland is separate from Carter’s boyhood home, which is managed by the National Park Service. It includes the working lands where he toiled as a child with his father Earl,
growing peanuts, corn and sugarcane. Carter returned to the farm in 1953 after serving in the Navy to manage the business.
Later in life, he and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, took quiet walks through the woods on the land to get away from the hectic day-to-day of their public lives.
"For our family, this land was always about more than a farm. It was home — a place my grandparent's treasure," the president’s grandson, Jason Carter, said in a statement. "We’re grateful to The Conservation Fund and to everyone working to make sure it’s protected for generations to come."
Funderburke believes the planned land use will pay tribute to Carter’s strong record of conservationism. As president, he established dozens of sites in the National Park System and enacted the largest expansion of protected public lands in U.S. history.
Near the end of his life, Carter requested his family farm be restored to its native state and replanted with longleaf pine trees.
The nearby Lanahassee Creek Wildlife Management Area, of which it will soon become a part, was established in 2019 for the same purpose of protecting the longleaf pine habitat, Funderburke explained. The threatened gopher tortoise relies on the habitat.
Funderburke said the state of Georgia will reimburse the Conservation Fund for part of the purchase cost. The state is expected to take over the lands, and make them available for recreation in 2028.
Before then, the Conservation Fund said the Carter family plans to allow hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation on the land.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jimmy Carter's Georgia peanut farm to become public land
