About Us
Land Trust of Virginia (LTV) partners with private landowners who wish to voluntarily protect and preserve their working farmland or natural lands with significant historic, scenic, and ecological value for the benefit of our community using conservation easements.
A conservation easement is a private legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust, such as LTV, that permanently protects land and its conservation values. Together, the landowner and the land trust craft the legal easement document to protect the land's significant historic, natural, and cultural attributes. The landowner still owns the property, but the conservation easement is a permanent legal document that gets recorded with the property’s deed and travels with the property even when the property changes ownership.
Conservation easements are a strategy for protection and provide the opportunity to improve water quality, preserve cultural and historic sites, protect plant and animal communities, sustain working landscapes and natural areas, and enhance our quality of life.
Accreditation
The Land Trust of Virginia has been working diligently to preserve open spaces since our founding in 1992. In 2009, LTV was officially accredited by the Land Trust Alliance Accreditation Commission, an independent program of the National Land Trust Alliance. Following a rigorous review, it was determined that LTV met or exceeded the industry’s best practices, ensuring “national quality standards for protecting important natural places and working lands forever.”
As an accredited conservation land trust, Land Trust of Virginia has the expertise to help in your conservation legacy. For further information, contact Ashton Cole, Executive Director, at 540-687-8441 or ashton@landtrustva.org.
What Accreditation Means for Land Trusts
History
Founded in 1992, Land Trust Virginia has helped landowners protect their properties through conservation easements for 33 years. Each easement is as unique as the property it protects. Given that conservation easements are our sole focus, LTV has achieved a high level of expertise in this work. 
Our easement program is the largest of Virginia’s non-profit land trusts and is highly regarded within the conservation community for our conservation accomplishments and stewardship of the easements once they have been recorded.