King County owns a farm on the Snoqualmie River, just south of Duvall, that has sat idle since 2020. This is the land's own story, told from the public record, and a plan to bring it back to life: as a community farm, a food hub in the old barn, and the trailhead the county always meant to build. At the end, we ask where you fit.
Use the arrows, or your keyboard. Nothing is asked of you until you have the whole picture.
Seventy-five and eight-tenths acres on Duvall-Monroe Road, fronting the Snoqualmie River near the mouth of Cherry Creek. It is zoned agricultural, the assessor lists its use as "Farm," and a landmark barn still stands on it. King County Parks bought the whole parcel, in fee, in December 2020, and it has been in grass ever since.
King County is one of the hardest places in Washington to start a farm; new growers spend years hunting for ground they can afford. This ground was a working cattle farm the whole time it was private: the county's own 2017 survey mapped 85 percent of it as farmed pasture. The farming stopped at exactly one moment, the day the public bought it. When the need and the asset are this mismatched, something in the machine is broken.
In November 1986, under the voter-approved Farmland Preservation Program, the farm's owners deeded its development rights to King County: the whole tract, permanently. The recorded purpose of that instrument is to keep this land farmland, forever. Neighbors up and down the valley signed the same kind of deed that same season. Some of the older ones among us remember it.
The public bought the farming future in 1986. The public bought the farm itself in 2020, with conservation and parks-levy money, for a trail extension that remains unfunded, ranked 31st on the county's own needs list at an estimated 17 to 35 million dollars. Today the land delivers neither the farming the first purchase promised nor the trail the second one planned. That is not a scandal. It is a gap, and gaps can be filled.
The parcel is held by the Parks division, whose job is trails, not farming. It was never moved into the county's own farm-lease program, which runs on about one staffer and cannot absorb it. The county even named this exact pattern in a 2016 review, land bought for one purpose, its farmland potential left unrealized, and never resourced the fix. No one is at fault, and no one is assigned.
This is the insight the whole project turns on. Hold onto it.
That is precisely where a community comes in. An organization built to farm and to serve its neighbors can close a gap a trails division never could. Putting this land back to work is not a fight with the county; it is the county's own promises, both of them, finally being kept, on-mission with its stated goals for food access and local farming. We are not accusing anyone. We are doing the thing that fell through the cracks.
The three parts are not a wish list. Each one makes the others possible.
The food hub is the multiplier. A market and a commercial kitchen turn raw produce into value-added goods with real margin, and the trailhead delivers a steady stream of ready customers past the farm store. Commercial revenue is what makes the community farming durable and self-supporting, rather than a charity case that needs topping up every year.
21 Acres in Woodinville runs a working farm, a farm market, and a commercial teaching kitchen on agricultural land in the Sammamish Valley, under this same county. Oxbow Farm in Carnation and SnoValley Tilth's food-hub work are neighbors too. What we are proposing is not a theory to be invented from scratch; it is a proven model, in this county's own soil.
The parcel's riverbank carries three named county flood facilities, and the title record includes a 25-foot public right of way along the water. Meanwhile, restoration crews are working the creek mouth immediately next door, right now, through 2026: riprap out, willow stakes in. Our plan folds the bank in rather than fencing it off: a stewarded riparian buffer, designed with the county and its restoration partners, alongside the farm. Fish, farm, and flood on one parcel, at peace.
The land carries not one but two recorded instruments. The 2020 deed's conservation covenant bars a sale and bars converting the land to a different use. And beneath it sits the 1986 easement: the development rights are simply not for sale, because the public already owns them. Most people hear that and stop. That is the wall this project has to get through.
King County Code 26.12.010.K exempts joint-use agreements and operations "compatible with the use of a project" from the conversion rule. Bounded agriculture, a farm store within the county's own size limits, value-added processing, and a trailhead that advances the trail purpose are all compatible operations. And here is the part most proposals cannot say: farming is not merely compatible with this land's encumbrances. It is the recorded purpose of the 1986 one. The lease does not bend the promises; it performs them.
The enterprise is a cooperative, a Limited Cooperative Association. It has two kinds of members. Patron members, the workers, growers, and participants, hold voting control. A second class supplies capital without voting control. Ownership and control stay local and accountable, which is the entire point.
Between raising money and pouring concrete sits a gate. Surveys and an initial design must clear three tests before the formation money is released: a buildable envelope on the ground, a cost that fits the budget, and the county's yes. If it fails, the formation money refunds. The earlier, smaller money is spent buying the answer either way.
The land will never be anyone's to flip, and there is no acquisition to sell into. Capital that comes in is bounded on purpose, because the purpose is a community that owns what it builds, on land whose future the community's own county already owns. This deal is built for patient, local, mission-aligned capital, and it will not pretend to be anything else.
There is no hard collateral here. The entire return rests on the county leasehold: how long it runs, whether it renews, whether it can be mortgaged, and the right to cure a default. Then read the two recorded instruments beneath it, the 1986 easement and the 2020 covenant, because their terms bound everything the lease permits. Lead your diligence there, before the pro forma, before anything else.
Lease target: thirty to forty years, plus renewals. The 1986 easement's verbatim text is on order and will be read before anything is signed.