PROVIDENCE — The 2024 ballot question asking Rhode Islanders to support environmental spending passed with flying colors Tuesday.

Voters embraced the so-called Green Bond, Question 4, heartily, approving the borrowing by a 3-to-1 margin, and advocates are celebrating the environment’s popularity in another election.

“The Green Bond received the highest level of approval of all the bond questions on the ballot, winning in all 39 cities and towns in the state,” said Jed Thorp, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Save The Bay. “The bond will lead to meaningful investments in climate resilience, and the protection of farms, forests and open space — all of it will benefit the bay and watershed.”

The state early next year will take out $53 million in bonds to spend on habitat restoration, farmland preservation, coastal resiliency, and, to the chagrin of any advocate with a hint of a green thumb, $15 million for industrial upgrades in the Port of Davisville in North Kingstown.

It’s a big win for land preservation. Rhode Island’s chief constant, aside from being the country’s largest small town, is its diminutive size. Land, to put it simply, is at a high premium in the smallest state.

Undeveloped land, green space — in Rhode Island these are often the cheapest sites to develop, and thanks to the state’s tiny-but-mighty size, they are few. Whether development proposals come from “good” projects such as solar farms or housing, or deleterious projects like fossil fuel terminals or strip malls, the perfect land parcel for contractors remains anything with trees on-site.

That means the state’s most endangered parcels — remaining forestland and farmland — are almost always at risk. Once upon a time, Rhode Island, like so many other states in the Union, was almost entirely farmland outside Providence. After World War II, farmland, bit by bit, gave way to suburban sprawl as families fled the cities and set up homesteads in what was once prime agricultural land that helped feed the state’s population.

It’s farmland preservation that has received increased scrutiny since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2022 election, the state’s farmland preservation program, run jointly by the Department of Environmental Management and a public body called the Agricultural Preservation Lands Commission, received no funding, the first time in 20 election cycles the program was left out. The ALPC was created in 1981 to preserve the rapidly vanishing farmland just as suburban sprawl was growing to the gargantuan appetite we know today.

The General Assembly later swooped in during last year’s budget process, saving the ALPC from going entirely defunct with a $2.5 million one-time allocation in that year’s budget.

It nearly happened again this year — Gov. Dan McKee’s bond proposals didn’t include money for farmland preservation and open space acquisition, breaking with nearly 40 years of precedent of those programs appearing in bond questions on the ballot.

Rep. Megan Cotter, D-Exeter, and environmental groups lobbied the General Assembly to add money to those and other programs to the bond. Citing a bigger tax revenue surplus than expected, the budget passed by lawmakers included more money for farmland preservation.

“This would have taken us a very long time without the funds we got from the ALPC,” Jennifer Fusco, director of the Westerly Land Trust, told ecoRI news in an interview earlier this month about the trust’s recent purchase of farmland.

Last month, the Westerly Land Trust announced it had, quite literally, bought the farm. In a purchase that took up most of this year, the land trust bought and preserved some 90 acres of prime agricultural land known as Champlin’s Farm. Owned by the family of the same name, said Fusco, they were looking to preserve it as farmland.

The newly purchased parcel abuts two already existing farms, West Farm Organics, also in Westerly, and the much larger Beriah Lewis Farm, across the Pawcatuck River in Connecticut. The Champlin land won’t be used for agriculture, said Fusco; rather, the current plan is to use it mostly for grassland and pasture. A 5-acre quarry on the parcel will be filled in and remediated.

The purchase will provide a much-needed boost to farms, and public access, in the southwest corner of the state. The land trust has yet to decide on specifics, but Fusco told ecoRI News they’d likely open the new purchase to the public, similar to their other property holdings in Westerly.

Fusco credited the purchase to money from the 2022 Green Bond, when the ALPC voted to award the land trust $700,000 toward the purchase of Champlin’s Farm. The DEM awarded the town a $330,000 open space grant, provided it could raise matching funds, which it did via private donations.

It was the first land deal with ALPC funding for the Westerly Land Trust, and Fusco told ecoRI News it was likely not the last.

“We are shouting from the rooftops,” she said. “We need people to vote for the Green Bond. This year it was $5 million in state funding for farmland preservation.”