Volusia County’s Deep Creek Preserve will soon grow by about 1,300 acres, following the state’s recent approval of a Florida Forever project to acquire a ranch property just northeast of the preserve and set it aside for conservation.
The Carter Quail Ranch is one of seven natural resource protection projects recently approved by the governor and Florida Cabinet, including three projects in Central Florida. For all seven projects, the state approved spending a total $317 million.
In addition to the Volusia ranch, two Polk County projects totalling nearly 900 acres will be preserved, according to the state. Most of those acres will be protected by a conservation easement, a voluntary agreement restricting how a parcel of land may be used without actually changing land ownership.
Florida’s Rural and Family Lands Protection Program enters into such conservation easements with landowners, typically farmers and ranchers who are allowed to continue farming the land, at least to some extent, under the agreement.
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Conservation easements are the avenue of protection for most of the land acreage in the recently approved projects. But in Volusia County, the state will fully acquire the Carter Quail Ranch through the Florida Forever program. The area will then require a land management plan, to be approved by the county and Florida Department of Environmental Protection, according to Tim Telfer, the county’s chief of conservation acquisition.
“That [plan] will spell out in greater detail the uses on the property: how we're going to handle public access, where we're going to have the access points, parking, all the trail systems,” Telfer said, “everything you can think of to make these conservation properties work for public access.”
The county had been eyeing the 1,335-acre property since 2021 for its taxpayer-funded land protection program, Volusia Forever, Telfer said. But bringing these kinds of projects to fruition usually takes lots of time — and partnership.
“It’s a lot of collaboration to get to the finish line on these things,” Telfer said. “We collaborate a great deal in what I would call the conservation acquisition community … We're all looking to work towards this conservation goal.”
The land itself includes between 450 and 600 acres of wetland and lots of high-quality uplands, Telfer said, including some valuable aquifer recharge areas, where water percolates down into dry, sandy soils, helping replenish the state’s primary drinking water supply.
“We’ve got a little bit of everything on this property,” Telfer said. “We still see some remnants of the old pine flatwoods on the property, including longleaf pine, which is very exciting for us.”
The area is part of the Volusia Conservation Corridor as well as the larger, statewide Florida Wildlife Corridor: both visions for protecting fully-connected, environmentally sensitive swaths of land. Of the seven recently-approved projects, five are within the boundaries of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, according to the state.
