The political resonance is quieter than the practical one: a president remembered for protecting vast tracts of public land has, in death, added a modest Georgia acreage to the same estate.
The family farm of Jimmy Carter, the former US president who died in December 2024 aged 100, has been acquired by a conservation group that intends to open the south-west Georgia land to the public, according to a report in The Guardian. The Conservation Fund said in a statement that it plans to allow hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation on the roughly 2,458-acre property outside Plains, Georgia, as soon as 2027, and to transfer the land to the state's natural resources department in 2028.
The group said the farm would ultimately become part of Georgia's Lanahassee Creek wildlife management area, expanding it to nearly 7,000 acres. The purchase, announced on Monday, is presented by the Conservation Fund as a way of permanently protecting a property central to Carter's life and to the conservation record of his single term in office, which began in 1977.
The fund drew a direct line between Carter's upbringing and his later decisions. Raised on the farm, he worked alongside his father, Earl, in the family's peanut, corn and sugarcane operations, explored the surrounding woods and returned throughout his life to hunt, to walk with his late wife, Rosalynn, and to fish in the property's pond. According to the Conservation Fund, he signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in late 1980, protecting more than 104 million acres in what the group describes as the largest expansion of protected public lands in US history, and established 39 national park system units, among them the Martin Luther King Jr national historic site and the Chattahoochee River national recreation area in Atlanta.
The group also said Carter asked that his family maintain a stand of mature longleaf pine, and that in one of his final land conservation decisions he had much of the farm replanted with young longleaf pine. The aim was to help restore the native forest that once covered the region, a habitat for tortoises that conservationists have been working to keep off the endangered species list. Creeks adjacent to the farm are home to rare freshwater mussels, the report notes.
Stacy Funderburke, vice-president of the Conservation Fund's central south-east region, said in a statement attributed to him that long before Carter protected millions of acres across America he was a boy working the fields and roaming the woods of south-west Georgia, and that the land shaped him and his legacy. Carter's grandson Jason said the land was always about more than a farm, describing it as home and a place his grandparents treasured.
What is not yet confirmed is the price paid for the property, the precise terms of the planned transfer to the state, and how access will be managed once the land opens. The timeline given by the Conservation Fund places public access in 2027 and the handover in 2028, but the report does not say what conditions attach to either. The political resonance is quieter than the practical one: a president remembered for protecting vast tracts of public land has, in death, added a modest Georgia acreage to the same estate.
