MD Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation Easements

This program was created by the Maryland General Assembly in 1977, is governed by the Agricultural Article, Sections 2-501 through 2-519 of the Annotated Code of Maryland. MALPF’s primary purpose is to preserve productive agricultural land and woodland to provide for the continuing production of food and fiber for the citizens of Maryland. This is accomplished by landowners voluntarily applying to sell an easement on their property through a competitive State-wide application process. MALPF easement boundaries are estimated based on property descriptions provided by MDA, aligned to MD iMap parcel polygons and supplemented with MdProperty View data to facilitate use with vectorized parcel data. This GIS dataset is intended for general guidance and use only and is not designed as a substitute for legal survey. The coordinates displayed do not represent legal parcel corners and/or boundaries and they cannot be used for establishment of or in lieu of legal land survey boundaries.In June 2019 new fields were added to facilitate the integration of this dataset with the Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US). Attributes for these fields, which are identified below as PAD-US fields, are not available for all data collected historically. The Maryland Department of Planning will continue to populate these new fields as updates become available. For a full description of the contents of the PAD-US fields, see https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/science-analytics-and-synthesis/gap/pad-us-datamanual.Attributes within this dataset include:Source Protected Area ID (PAD-US field): MALPF easement numberSettled Acres: Settlement acreageSettled Date: Settlement date, including month date and yearCounty: County in which protected land is locatedWeblink: Link to more information about the protection programCategory (PAD-US field): PAD-US classification for the protection mechanism associated with the protected propertyOwner Type (PAD-US field): General land owner type of the fee property interest, standardized for the USOwner Name (PAD-US field): Owner of the fee interest of the property, standardized for the nationLocal Owner (PAD-US field): The actual name of the owner of the fee interestEasement Holder Type (PAD-US field): Where the ‘Category’ of protection code (above) is listed as “Easement”, this field specifies the type of holder of the easement.Easement Holder (PAD-US field): Where the ‘Category’ of protection code (above) is listed as “Easement”, this field indicates the actual name of the holder of the conservation easement.Unit Name (PAD-US field): The name of the land management unit or protected areaState (PAD-US field): Name of state in which the protected land is locatedAggregator Source (PAD-US field): Organization credited with data aggregation. Attributed in the format 'organization name_filenameYearPublished.filetype'GIS Source (PAD-US field): The original source of GIS spatial and attribute information the aggregator obtained where availableGIS Source Date (PAD-US field): The date (yyyy/mm/dd) GIS data was obtained by the data source for aggregationGIS Acres (PAD-US field): Acres calculated for each polygon in NAD83 Meters. The GIS Acres may differ from the Settled Acres, particularly in cases where easement boundaries are estimated based on parcel polygon boundaries.Date of Protection (PAD-US field): The year (yyyy) the property was legally protected via fee acquisition or enactment of a conservation easementPublic Access (PAD-US field):Accessibility of the property to the public, standardizedLast updated: October 22, 2025

Organization: State of Maryland