Salinas farming incubator ALBA prepares to sell its 195-acre North County ranch and restored wetlands.

After decades of farming degraded wetlands along Elkhorn Slough, the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) tried something new. The agricultural nonprofit did habitat restoration work where there used to be crop fields, bringing back breeding grounds for threatened red-legged frogs and tiger salamanders.

Another nonprofit, the land trust Elkhorn Slough Foundation, holds a conservation easement on ALBA’s 195-acre Triple M Ranch in Las Lomas. The easement restricts agriculture to 60 acres of the property. Small organic farmers who graduated from ALBA’s farm incubator training lease the arable parcels.

Now Triple M is going up for sale. Whoever buys it will also buy the permanent conservation easement that restricts its uses to conservation and farming.

The idea at ALBA is to graduate organic farmers from its two ranches (the headquarters is south of Salinas), then free up small plots for incoming students. But some growers have stayed at Triple M Ranch for years; there’s less pressure for them to move out because the hilly land with challenging soil isn’t as desirable as at ALBA’s headquarters, where growers rotate in and out faster.

“It’s a drain on resources to manage two pieces of land,” ALBA Executive Director Christopher Brown says. “It’s a tough call, but we have to focus on the farmer development aspect of our mission.”

That means an unknown future for Triple M.

“There’s a lot of flexibility [in the easement], knowing the future is unpredictable,” Elkhorn Slough Foundation Director Mark Silberstein says. It also represents the foundation’s single largest easement, accounting for about two-thirds of the acreage in conservation easements ESF holds.

It’s too soon to know what that means for property value; the property hasn’t yet been put on the market. The ALBA board hopes to find a like-minded nonprofit buyer.