California State Director

Edward Thompson, Jr., is the California State Director for American Farmland Trust. Thompson took over the position in the fall of 2003, having been AFT’s general counsel and senior vice president, among the other capacities in which he has served the organization since joining it in 1981, shortly after it was founded.

Although he lived on the east coast until moving to California in early 2005, Thompson has long been active in California. He helped draft the state’s right-to-farm law and legislation establishing the California Farmland Conservancy Program. He orchestrated AFT’s 1995 study Alternatives for Future Urban Growth in California’s Central Valley, which helped put farmland preservation on the map in the state’s most important agricultural region. And he collaborated with the late Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, on a study of how more secure water rights for California farmers could encourage farmland preservation.

He brings to California extensive experience with farmland preservation from coast to coast and from the nation’s capital to the local level. Thompson led AFT’s successful effort to get the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program in the 1996 federal farm bill, which now provides $100 million a year for agricultural conservation easements. He was the architect of purchase of development rights programs in both the state of Pennsylvania and Montgomery County, Maryland, which lead the nation in the amount of farmland preserved at the state and local levels, respectively. He has also lectured and published extensively about conservation policy and property rights, and has negotiated dozens of land conservation transactions around the country.

Thompson began his legal career in 1973 as Washington counsel for Environmental Defense (Fund) and has also worked as an attorney-advisor to the National Association of Counties. He earned a B.A. in government at Cornell and a law degree at George Washington University, and is a member of the bars of Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Supreme Court.

He and his wife, Ann, live in Davis.