The Diamond Back Grill will cater a luncheon. Safrit Auction Co. will solicit bids for artwork, collectibles, antiques, jewelry, trips and sports tickets. Artisans will be demonstrating their crafts all afternoon, as the Cool Springs Ramblers play old-time string music in the background.

Maybe best of all, the day will include tours of the plantation house. This by-invitation, second annual festival raises money for the LandTrust for Central North Carolina at $75 a person and $125 a couple.

Donors get their money’s worth in both a day’s entertainment and the knowledge that they contributed to an organization that’s actually accomplishing what politicians like to claim they’re doing all the time: protecting our children’s future.

Quietly, the land trust movement in North Carolina has made great strides in recent years in protecting special natural areas, family farms and rural landscapes for future generations. Serving 10 counties, the Salisbury-based LandTrust for Central North Carolina is one of the state’s 23 local and regional land trusts and probably one of the most successful.

Approaching its fifth year under Jeff Michael’s able direction, the land trust has preserved nearly 2,700 acres from future development, including places such as the Clarke Creek wetlands and rookery in Cabarrus County, the High Rock Lake Preserve in Rowan County, the Pisgah Covered Bridge and the Cooleemee Plantation.

The land trust also has a role in studying a Gold Hill Rail Trail, making a natural heritage inventory in Montgomery and Richmond counties, conducting a land exchange program on the Little River and restoring buffers along Grants Creek.

Most recently, the local land trust has served as a conduit for the new N.C. Farmland Preservation Trust Fund. Rowan dairy farmers Ray and Shelby Karriker placed a conservation easement on 80 acres of their land. The land trust used a grant from the state farmland preservation fund to pay the Karrikers half of the value of their conservation easement, and the Karrikers donated the other half.

The move helps ensure the future of the Karrikers’ dairy operation while also protecting the farmland against future development. This represents the first application by the land trust of a “PDR” program — purchase of development rights. An important partnership of state Sen. Jim Phillips of Lexington, former land trust employee Ed Norvell of Salisbury and the Conservation Trust for North Carolina worked hard to both establish the farmland preservation program and see that its funding be increased this year to $500,000.