James Hetfield donates 1,000 acres in Northern California to land trust

March 1 (UPI) -- Metallica frontman James Hetfield donated more than 1,000 acres in Northern California's Marin County to a local land trust in a deal that was made official on Tuesday.

The Marin Agricultural Land Trust, a non-profit organization that protects California farmland, will now take over the land to provide "open space and recreational opportunities," said Craig Richardson, the senior open space planner at Marin County Parks, the Mercury News reported.

"We believe this is a huge community benefit, and one of our goals is to keep agriculture on the ranch for a very long time," Hetfield said in a statement in November.

This isn't the first time Hetfield donated land for conservation purposes.

Last year, he gave 240 acres of from his Lucas Valley property to an agricultural conservation easement, the Marin Independent Journal reported. He and his wife, Francesca, also donated 440 acres of another California ranch to a conservation easement in 2005 and another 330 acres in 2009.

Hetfield has lived in the Marin County area since the 1980s. But in 2016, he said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that he was moving to Vail, Colo. because he was "sick of the attitudes of the people" in the Bay Area.

"They talk about how diverse they are, and it's fine if you're diverse like them," he said at the time. "But showing up with a deer on the bumper doesn't fly in Marin County. My form of eating organic doesn't jibe with theirs."