Every year our staff selects the “Land Steward of the Year” to honor volunteers who assist us with the ongoing maintenance, monitoring, protection, and improvement of Placer Land Trust preserved lands. Collectively, we call this “land stewardship.”
We recently presented the 2016 Land Steward of the Year award to the Burgeson Family – Adrian, Dayna, and Evan. This amazing family has lived in Placer County for the last 35 years and began volunteering with us last year. As individuals, or together as a family, they’ve helped us on several preserves by planting trees, performing trail work, tabling at events, establishing artificial nests for burrowing owls, helping with event set-up, and more.
They are also land stewards of their own property caring for their 2.5-acre mandarin farm in Newcastle where they’ve lived for 28 years. The Burgeson farm has about 200 trees including avocado, nut, fruit, specialty citrus and mandarins, all of which are grown organically. Adrian has filled their farm with as many trees as he could squeeze in on their 2.5 acres.
Before retiring to take care of his farm full time, Adrian taught 3rd and 4th grade math and science in Rocklin for over 30 years in. He is proud to be credited with starting the school garden at Parker Whitney Elementary more than 30 years ago. Adrian said “I like Placer Land Trust because they think several generations ahead, and putting land aside for the future is a good thing.”
Dayna is a Dietician specializing in child diabetis at the UC Davis Medical Center, and grew up in the Santa Rosa area. She indicated that she first learned about land conservation while growing up from The Nature Conservancy. Dayna laughed and said, “Adrian loves to plant trees with PLT because he ran out of room to plant more on our farm. He just loves planting things.”
Dayna and Adrian raised their son Evan in Newcastle, before Evan left the area to join the Coast Guard for six years and served as a cargo plane mechanic. While in the Coast Guard he traveled to Alaska and the North Pole with NOAA and NASA on a research project. Evan now attends college focusing on a biology degree when he’s not racing with the Victory Velo bike team. Evan says, “Volunteering with Placer Land Trust gives me a rare opportunity to see a hillside carefully transformed to include a multi-use trail and getting the experience of being outdoors in nature helping to build the trail.”
In addition to taking care of their mandarin farm, the family enjoys kayaking, hiking and mountain biking. They learned about PLT when they met board member Jim Haagen-Smit, an avid bike rider himself, when PLT was raising funds for our trail campaign.
When asked why they chose to volunteer with Placer Land Trust Dayna reflected, “PLT is like family…a community, and we enjoy being involved.”
Enjoy this short video that was shown at our recent Placer Conservator event where they were honored with the award: https://youtu.be/FqFwwCiD6KY
