Buffeted by competition from lower priced imports, snarled in a tangle of environmental regulations, besieged by sprawling cities and suburbs, America's small family farmers can be forgiven for feeling like members of an endangered species. In Yolo County, farmers may soon have more in common with imperiled plants and wildlife than just their dwindling numbers. In an intriguing twist on implementation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a habitat conservation plan (HCP) that has been in the works for more than eight years may soon preserve thousands of acres of development-threatened farmland at the same time it tosses a life ring to dozens of rare species. It will, in fact, link farmers and protected creatures — often regarded as natural adversaries — in a symbiotic endeavor to maintain both the economic vitality of agriculture and the ecological viability of wildlife populations. The plan is not without drawbacks and potential critics. In some respects, it resembles the HCP developed for the Natomas Basin, in adjoining Sacramento County. A federal judge rejected the Natomas HCP in August 2000 for providing insufficient mechanisms to preserve wildlife habitat threatened by urban development. But there are crucial differences, too, which make the evolving Yolo County HCP worth examination by land-use regulators, environmental activists and farmland conservation advocates elsewhere in California's rapidly urbanizing agricultural regions. Habitat Conservation Plans are voluntary agreements negotiated between the federal government and private landowners or states. They allow private parties to obtain "incidental take" permits under the ESA, authorizing them to unintentionally harm or kill listed species during the course of otherwise lawful activity. In return, landowners agree to take steps to protect those species. In theory, an HCP incorporates measures that actually improve a species' chances for survival — allowing destruction of a small amount of habitat in one place, for example, while requiring preservation of an even greater amount elsewhere — while also enabling farmers to continue farming, loggers to continue logging, and builders to continue building. The Yolo County HCP, the most recent draft of which was released in January, is ambitious. It is intended to reconcile all projected urban growth over the next 20 years in the county's four cities (Davis, Woodland, West Sacramento and Winters) and its four unincorporated communities (Esparto, Dunnigan, Knights Landing and Clarksburg) with existing or potential state and federal protections for 26 species of plants, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects and crustaceans. The HCP encompasses 403,052 acres — 70 percent of the county. City and county general plans project 11,672 acres of mostly agricultural land within this HCP area will be converted to urban uses during the next two decades. The HCP traces its roots to 1993, when the four cities and the county signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), pledging to develop a regional plan that would allow projected urban growth to proceed within the cities while preserving wildlife habitat in the unincorporated rural landscape. The intent was to avoid the sort of project-by-project ESA mitigation that so often causes long delays in permitting without achieving meaningful protections for rare plants and wildlife whose habitat needs cannot be adequately assured on a piecemeal basis. The first "final" draft of the countywide HCP was released in 1996, and came under sharp criticism from environmental groups and biologists over its scientific underpinnings. They argued that the plan failed to describe adequately the population status and habitat needs of many of the creatures it purported to protect. They also said the plan lacked a mechanism for assuring that its generic mitigation technique — simply requiring that one acre of land be conserved for every acre developed — would accomplish anything. The HCP was revised, and then revised again to reflect new case law and new U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulations for HCPs. If the latest "preliminary" draft is adopted by all the government jurisdictions in Yolo County, and approved by USFWS and the California Department of Fish and Game, the permitting agencies in the cities and county will be granted an incidental take permit under the state and federal ESAs. These permits will authorize damage to the covered species and their habitats during urban development, and will also serve as mitigation for impacts to biological resources identified under the California Environmental Quality Act. In general, the Yolo County HCP is much like the hundreds of other HCPs negotiated throughout the nation in the past decade. These plans are vulnerable to criticism on scientific grounds and greeted with suspicion by environmental activists who view the plans as political devices intended to grease the skids for builders rather than genuine blueprints for wildlife preservation. What is most interesting here, however, is the difference between Yolo County's plan and nearly all other HCPs. Strictly speaking, there is very little pristine wildlife habitat left in Yolo County — mostly remnant grassland, scattered vernal pools, wetlands, and riparian woodland narrowly confined to stream and river corridors. The county is intensively farmed, and 82 percent of the undeveloped land addressed by the HCP is planted in crops. Many of the creatures the HCP is intended to protect live or forage in orchards, vineyards, tomato fields, agricultural drainage ditches and other agricultural features, and it is this farmland that the HCP talks about when it refers to habitat preservation. In other words, to save such creatures as the Swainson's hawk, giant garter snake and valley longhorn elderberry beetle, the Yolo County HCP has as its primary strategy the preservation of cropland where those animals feed, burrow, nest and roost. The plan is a biological rescue effort built around a farmland conservation program. It specifies a mitigation fee keyed to the estimated cost of purchasing conservation easements for farmland, and proposes a periodic review of the economic vitality of farms participating in that program. The January draft of the Yolo County HCP resides in limbo; this latest revision was conducted hurriedly, according to John Hopkins, who represents the Davis-based Institute for Ecological Health on the HCP steering committee. The current version has not been reviewed formally by that committee, and the process, he said, is on hold while local agencies prepare to revise the plan yet again to qualify for participation in the state's Natural Communities Conservation Program (California's version of the HCP program). Still, the notion that cropland might effectively be saved from the builder's bulldozers by wedding the fate of farmers to that of rare wildlife offers food for thought as urban pressures continue to build throughout California's agricultural heartland. Many farmers have long thought of themselves as an endangered species. In Yolo County, they are being treated like one. Contacts: John Hopkins, IEH: (530) 756-6455. Yolo County Planning Department: (530) 666-8775. Yolo County Draft HCP website: http://www.co.yolo.ca.us/HCP/hcp.htm