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# A Wright Township farm worked since the 1870s, and once a movie set, will stay a farm for good
- URL: https://www.mosaicwestmichigan.com/molyneux-farm-wright-township-preserved/
- Published: 2026-11-02T14:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-02T14:00:00.000Z
- Description: Wayne Molyneux has worked his 155 acres southeast of Coopersville since 1986, on land farmed since the 1870s and once used as a movie set. Now it is the 10th farm Ottawa County has protected from development, and the largest. "I didn't want that here," he said.
- Author: Mosaic Staff
- Tags: Civic, Allendale-Coopersville, Ottawa County

[Leer en español →](https://www.mosaicwestmichigan.com/granja-molyneux-wright-township-protegida/)

Wayne Molyneux has farmed the same two parcels southeast of Coopersville since 1986, when he bought them from the Stroven family. On October 27 he made sure they will never be anything else. Ottawa County closed on a permanent conservation easement on the 155 acres in Wright Township, making the Molyneux farm the 10th, and the largest, protected by the county's Farmland Preservation Program.

"You look out around the County and see development all over," Molyneux [told the county](https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/MIOTTAWA/bulletins/4286a14?ref=mosaicwestmichigan.com). "I didn't want that here."

Under the program, a farmer sells the county the right to develop the land. The farm can still be sold or handed down, but it stays farmland. Molyneux plans to leave it to his son, Joshua, who lives in Sparta, and hopes his grandchildren take an interest. If they end up with it and don't farm, he said, "they can't try to plot it all off."

The property is a Michigan Centennial Farm. The land and some of its buildings, including the house Molyneux lives in, date to the 1870s. He and his brother started out running what the Strovens had, a small herd of cows with corn and hay, then added pigs. Molyneux says he was one of the first around to grow barley to feed them instead of corn. Today the brothers grow hay and rotate corn and soybeans, which they sell to Zeeland Farm Services, and Molyneux leases about 38 acres to a neighbor. His son and grandchildren still hunt deer there.

The farm has had its moment on screen, too. In the late 2000s, filmmakers shot part of the time-travel football movie Touchback, starring Kurt Russell, inside the house and around the farm.

The farm stood out for its soil, all of it rated prime farmland by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Qualifying for money from both the federal Agricultural Conservation Easement Program and the Michigan Agricultural Preservation Fund is what made the deal possible. The county program runs entirely on grants, private donations and landowner contributions, said Julie Lamer, the county's farmland preservation analyst.

Ottawa County farms sell more than $726 million in products a year, and the county keeps growing around them. Molyneux and other farmers who have been through the program appear in Protecting Paradise, a new short documentary on the county's YouTube channel. Farmers interested in applying, and anyone who wants to donate, can start at the county's [farmland preservation page](https://miottawa.org/farmland?ref=mosaicwestmichigan.com).