Nine months after it was announced that the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust planned to purchase the Matsuda Farm, the organization announced this week that the sale of the former strawberry farm has been completed, and a ribbon cutting will be held today at 3 p.m.
Land Trust officials said that the 12-acre farm located behind the K2 industrial building is “a rare surviving link to Vashon’s Japanese-American strawberry-growing heritage.” The acreage is the last remaining land on the property still owned by Miyoko Matsuda, the daughter-in-law of the farm’s founding Japanese immigrants. The purchase and upcoming projects to preserve the farm are part of the nonprofit’s first farm conservation project.
The Land Trust first announced its plans to preserve the historic space in December, after Matsuda approached the organization and offered it for sale. The farm that was once 50 acres was the site of Vashon’s last large-scale commercial strawberry harvest in 1985.
Land Trust Executive Director Tom Dean said that the group plans to maintain the property as agricultural land by leasing it to qualified growers. However, he said that he also plans to keep the space open and create a trail system through the area as part of an ongoing effort to create a walking and recreational Town Loop Trail from Vashon through the Island Center Forest and near the O Space. Rare bird sightings in the area have also prompted preservation actions.
“We’ve been looking for a long time for the right farm conservation project and this is it,” Dean said in a news release.
The property was purchased for $510,000. Land Trust supporters provided $100,000 to secure the property, and the balance was paid with a loan from The Conservation Fund, an Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit organization that finances conservation purchases across the country. The loan will be repaid through the sale of a conservation easement to King County next January, authorities said. The Land Trust needs to raise an additional $30,000 by Dec. 31 to fully retire the loan.
The first step in the preservation process will be to renovate the 85-year-old Matsuda farmhouse with funds made possible through a $150,000 grant from the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. Once that is complete, the nonprofit plans to ask for proposals from people interested in operating the farm on a long-term lease.
“High land costs on Vashon are a big barrier to farmers who want to start or expand,” Land Trust President Charley Rosenberry said in a statement. “With the Land Trust as the new owner, we think there will be strong interest from individuals and families who want to farm this historic parcel.”
The farm’s rich history begins with the story of Heisuke Matsuda, an immigrant from Japan who founded the farm in 1930. He grew strawberries, loganberries, gooseberries, currants and Olympic berries, a Vashon hybrid, at the location for more than a decade until his family was uprooted and sent to an internment camp in Tule Lake, California, in the early 1940s. The family returned in 1945 and resumed farming until the 1980s, when demand for the berries fell due to cheaper alternatives elsewhere.
Miyoko Matsuda is the last member of her family to remain on the farm and has been growing hay there since 1985. In a December Beachcomber article, the now 80-year-old Miyoko Matsuda said she is happy to see her property go to the land trust.
“We (her and her granddaughters) had talked about how nice it would be if it could continue in agriculture because it was started by (her granddaughters’) father and grandfather, who put a lot of work into it,” she said in the article.
