Through the combined effort of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, the Sussex County government and the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, another 181 acres of the Springhouse dairy farm in Fredon, Sussex County have been preserved as farmland at a cost of $1.02 million.

Pete and Marilyn Southway, owners of the said farm on Phil Hardin Road, make artisanal cheeses on the farm. A hundred acres of the farm have already been preserved.

The farm is adjacent to other preserved farmland and is near the state’s Whittingham Wildlife Management Area and consists of rolling fields and wooded and scrub wetlands with the Bear Brook, a tributary of the Pequest River running through it.

The Southway couple became interested in preserving the farm while planning for the estate they will leave to their six children, who range in age from 9 to 27. They subdivided the 330-acre farm into six parcels of 40 to 50 acres each. Two of the lots had already been preserved by a previous owner.

The Conservation Foundation is a private, member-supported nonprofit that preserves land and natural resources throughout New Jersey. Since 1960, it has protected more than 120,000 acres of open space - from the Highlands to the Pine Barrens to the Delaware Bayshore, from farms to forests to urban and suburban parks.

It is really overwhelming that despite of the ever growing, fast paced technology that we have nowadays, there are people who still care about nature and want to preserve it as well. These well preserved parts of nature will then be a fresh sanctuary of our youth of today. They will still see amidst the buildings and infrastructures the greens and fresh air that everybody long for.

Two thumbs up for these people.