Over 300 acres of land hug either side of High Street just north of Boscawen’s town center. Pockets of rolling, lush fields form gaps in thick woodlands, giving way to views of distant mountains.
Joseph Colby rode his red Chevy Silverado truck through this land, which has belonged to his family for three generations. The Colby family ran a lumber business starting in the 1920s but ceased operation when a fire burned their sawmill in 2024.
While the business may have ended, Colby didn’t want to see anything unnatural creep onto the land he and his siblings grew up treasuring. Around the time of the fire, he started the processing of conserving the land.
“I think the answers are quite obvious,” Colby said. “To me, it’s important because there’s only so much land, buildable land, in New Hampshire and anywhere. Once houses are on it, there’s no more agriculture, and it won’t be conserved for the wildlife, for the water, for the timber, for agriculture, anything.”
A look at part of Joe Colby’s property in Boscawen, near Route 4. 
Lines of syrup tree lines span for miles on Joe Colby’s property, leading to the Outback Sugar Shack that his nephew runs. Credit: EMILIA WISNIEWSKI / Monitor 
A look at part of Joe Colby’s property in Boscawen, near Route 4. Credit: EMILIA WISNIEWSKI / Monitor 
A wide view of one of several sprawling fields within Joe Colby’s 309-acre property in Boscawen. Colby called this field the “Choata property,” which spans 55 acres. Credit: EMILIA WISNIEWSKI / Monitor
Land conservation is one tool to protect natural resources from development and control the purposes for which a parcel can be used. But with the state’s constrained housing supply, more sophisticated technologies and methods of conservation have allowed these competing interests to work alongside each other.
Across New Hampshire, over 1.85 million acres of land are protected on the federal, state, municipal and private levels, according to Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. Ninety-eight percent of that land is preserved through fee ownership and conservation easements.
Brian Hotz, senior conservation project manager with the Forest Society, explains the differences between the two methods: With conservation easements, the landowner largely sets the terms of what can be done with the land through an easement, such as agriculture or forestry, and works with a land trust to set those terms. The landowner still has ownership of the land with a conservation easement, but it gives a land trust permission to protect the land for specific purposes, beyond the landowner’s lifespan.
In fee ownership, landowners transfer the rights to their land to a conservation organization, which then has outright and direct control. What is done on the land can vary from organization to organization, Hotz said, but the baseline understanding is that the land trust has a responsibility to protect and maintain lands from development in perpetuity.
“It’s not like we could take that land and sell that land for development the next day if we just decided that was no longer fun to do land conservation,” Hotz said. “There’s a lot of scrutiny in how and what you do to ensure that you’re entrusted with these lands that you own or conservation easements that you hold.”
Paula Bellemore is the executive director of the Land and Community Heritage Investment Program, which awards grants to land conservation and historic preservation projects around New Hampshire. She points out some considerations for both models.
“It might be less expensive to buy an easement than to buy the land outright, but the long-term costs are significant,” Bellemore said. “You own that land and then you pass away or you sell it, the next person that buys it might not be as committed to that easement in those terms as you are, and so that can be a challenging relationship to the land trust.”
Colby went the conservation easement route through Five Rivers Conservation Trust, which has conserved 6,700 acress across 97 properties around the greater Concord area. Colby said it took a full year to go through the easement process, which requires thorough documentation and land surveying, but it was important for his late wife Barbara to protect their land.
Five Rivers Executive Director Liz Short said the trust works with owners to determine a piece of land’s allowed uses. The trust further analyzes properties using GIS technology to identify the areas within Merrimack County worth protecting.
In 2023, Five Rivers released its Regional Conservation Plan that uses mapping tools to identify areas of high conservation value based on wildlife habitats, potential agricultural land, undeveloped forests and valuable surface and groundwater resources. Conservation plans like this across New Hampshire not only help protect natural resources, but they also tell developers which areas are not ideal for housing or other projects.
“It takes resources, it takes people power and financial power, and it also really begins with landowners who have these strong convictions that these places that are open remain so and remain available to support, whether it’s agriculture or forest products or places to walk and trails to access and beautiful views,” Short said.
Another piece of land protected with Five Rivers is Bohanan Farm in Hopkinton. The land and has been passed down for five generations since 1907 and is now operated by Jamie Robertson, his wife and three sons.
The family considered placing an easement on their 413-acre property in 2008. The costs to conserve were substantial, and Robertson asked town of Hopkinton to purchase the development rights. In the largest town meeting of Hopkinton’s history, the majority of residents voted in favor of protecting the land.
“It’s always been open to the public, and it’s always been a resource that’s fed the community. To us, that was just of utmost importance,” Robertson said. “Whether we farmed it or not, we wanted it to remain firmly and to continue to feed the community.”
With approximately one-third of New Hampshire’s land in conservation, the question of housing development remains. The state has grappled with low housing inventory for over a decade while the cost of available homes keeps rising. The cost of rent has also increased, posing another barrier for potential homeowners to save up to afford a home.
Nick Taylor, the executive director of Housing Action New Hampshire, said policies on both housing and the environment share the same goal: being more efficient with land use. Building a starter home on multiple acres of land, for example, is not ideal economically or environmentally.
“The question isn’t can we just stay the exact same. The question is how do we move forward as a state?” Taylor said. “Your options are make more efficient use of more currently populated areas or currently built-out areas, or sprawl out. And I don’t think anybody wants us to sprawl out.”
Hotz echoed on that point, saying advancements in technology have made conservation efforts much more targeted. It’s also better identified areas that wouldn’t be optimal for development in the first place, like wetlands or steep hillsides.
“The job of conservation isn’t to prevent development; it’s to protect the best conservation land, and with the improvement of mapping that we have nowadays with computers and GIS and things of that nature, I think you’ll find there’s less and less conflict with the development,” he said.
Colby, now retired, spends his days in the vintage colonial house he inherited from his mother and occasionally trimming the fields on his land. He said he felt at ease knowing that his forests, ponds and meadows will long outlive him.
“We won’t be growing houses instead of hay,” Colby said.
