In 2003, DALC completed our first-ever conservation easement. Twenty years later, our celebration of this milestone is bittersweet – the donors, Deane and Edith Arny, are no longer with us. But their tremendous legacy lives on in the Driftless.
For over forty years, Deane and Edith worked alongside their friends and family to restore a worn-out farm they named Valley Ridge in Richland County. Rolling, wooded hills were enrolled in Managed Forest Law for sustainable timber harvest. Old farm fields were seeded to native savanna through CRP. Despite bustling careers and personal lives – Deane was a professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison, and Edith was raising five children – land management was always a priority. Planting trees, removing non-native species, and carrying out prescribed burns kept the Arny family busy.
The land was also a place of celebration, including big Thanksgiving dinners with the family at the property’s century-old farmhouse – even though the only running water came from a nearby spring!
This love of their land brought Deane and Edith to the newly-minted Driftless Area Land Conservancy in the early 2000s. “I can remember going out there with a couple conservancy folks,” says David Kopitzke, a founding member of DALC and secretary of the board in 2003. “Deane and Edith were well up in years, but still both quite active. Deane took us up on the hill behind the house. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is just the kind of land DALC is concerned with protecting. I’m so happy it’s getting an easement.’”
Although the process of creating our very first conservation easement was nerve-wracking for DALC – “We were completely at sea,” David admits – the guidance of Gathering Waters, Wisconsin’s alliance for land trusts, made it possible. Today, Valley Ridge is owned and stewarded by the Leonardo Academy, a sustainability-focused nonprofit founded by Deane and Edith’s son, Michael Arny, where their daughter Dr. Barbara McCabe also works.
Deane passed away in 2013 at the age of 95, and Edith in 2022 at the age of 102. But they had one final gift for the Driftless.
Last fall, DALC was honored to receive an incredibly generous gift from the estate of Deane and Edith Arny – one of the largest donations in our history. Their kindness, commitment, and foresight to include us in their will has given us an amazing boost in capacity, enabling us to permanently protect more land in the Driftless region Deane and Edith loved.
“The first easement is when you’re really brought face-to-face with the idea of perpetual protection,” David recalls. “We were thinking, ‘how are we going to be able to do this forever’?”
Twenty years later, as DALC continues to grow and thrive, we have our answer: we can protect land in perpetuity with the support, dedication, and generosity of our community. We will forever be grateful to Deane and Edith Arny for putting their trust in us, and paving the way for a bright future of land conservation in our treasured Driftless region.