States Buying ‘Development Rights’ to Keep Families on Farms

FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP, N.J. —  Susan and Ted Blew are having fun these days growing vegetables on their 160-acre farm, making some money and raising three children in wide open spaces only 45 minutes from the smokestacks of industrial Newark.

Things weren’t always so good.

For five years, they struggled, saddled with a six-figure mortgage and a floating interest rate that reached 16%.

Theirs was a Catch-22 situation. To make more money to pay the mortgage, the Blews rented 1,000 more acres and grew wholesale grain. They considered it drudgery, and, worse, the new loans only added to their debt.

Then, about two years ago, they found a way to pay off their mortgage, keep their Hunterdon County farm for their children and make money growing what they wanted: They sold development rights to their land to the state of New Jersey as part of a farmland-preservation program.

Trend Spreads

More and more state and local governments are giving top priority--and tens of millions of dollars--to farmland-preservation programs, efforts to save rapidly vanishing open space from developers. The trend is spreading from the Northeast, where it started, to the South and West.

The government assesses the land’s value for farming and compares that to its higher worth for housing or commercial use, such as a mall. The farmer is offered the difference in dollars in return for an agreement that the land can never be sold for development. The farmer keeps the property and can still sell it, but its deed will be restricted to farming or open space use.

The Blews received almost $900 an acre or $143,500 from the state and county, which split the cost. That same day, Dec. 19, 1985, they turned the check over to the bank, paying off their mortgage, on which they had been making payments of close to $10,000 every six months, and an outstanding business loan.

“We had $10 (left) to go to lunch,” Ted said. They celebrated at a Ponderosa restaurant with steaks and chocolate milk. “It came to $10.12,” said Susan, smiling.

The Blews can afford to smile now. The pressure is off.

“It relieved the pressure of that exploding interest rate,” Ted said. “You enjoy working when you’re making some money, when you’re able to pay your bills and have something left over.”

New Jersey’s share of the money came from a $50-million bond issue voters approved in 1981.

Other states with similar farmland and open space preservation programs include Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Local programs exist in Boulder County, Colo.; Forsyth and Mecklenburg counties in North Carolina, whose respective seats are Winston-Salem and Charlotte; King County, Wash., around Seattle; and Northern California’s Marin and Solano counties. In Collin County, Tex., north of Dallas, officials are trying to raise funds for land preservation.

Over the last decade, almost 100,000 acres of working farmland have been saved, said Jim Riggle, director of field operations for American Farmland Trust in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization that works to conserve agriculture.

The success of preservation programs, however, doesn’t mean development is being slowed.

Riggle estimated that since World War II, about 70 million to 100 million acres of U.S. agricultural land has been converted to commercial or residential use, or has been used for highway or other public works projects. That leaves no more than 1.2 billion acres of privately owned open land nationwide, of which 575 million are being farmed or have a high potential for farming, while the rest remains unused for crops because of its lesser quality.

Roughly 3 million acres of farmland are being lost every year, he said.

“Six out of 10 of the most productive agricultural counties are either already classified in metropolitan areas or adjacent to them,” he said. “That’s where the action is taking place. There is a general degrading of the quality of our land in this country.”

Development pressure in Massachusetts remains strong even though the state has already spent $45 million to buy up rights and preserve nearly 20,000 acres. The Legislature last December approved an additional $35 million for the program.

Why? “You’re preserving the economic fabric of the rural area. It has an additional benefit. It’s a working landscape,” replied August Schumacher Jr., Massachusetts commissioner of food and agriculture.

Ron Allbee, Vermont’s commissioner of agriculture, agreed.

“We sell Vermont to tourists for the pristine open space, for the small villages,” Allbee said. “I think there’s a broader concern. If we lose our agriculture, we’re going to lose what people identify as Vermont.”

Even in big cities, such as Philadelphia, voters are overwhelmingly approving bond issues to buy up the rights. There are many reasons.

In Pennsylvania, which is just beginning its program after voters approved a $100-million bond issue in November, agriculture is the No. 1 industry.

Pennsylvania has 56,500 farms that produce crops worth $3.2 billion a year and generate $35 billion in related business. But since 1960, the state has lost 50,000 farms and 3.8 million acres of land that went out of production, most of it believed to be for development.

Along with economics, sentiment helped the pro-preservation forces, state Sen. Noah W. Wenger said.

“Even people that live in the cities can remember their grandfather or their uncle living on a farm,” he said, “and they have a certain affinity to that and I think that was in its favor.”

But even more, Wenger said, was the realization that about 20% of all the jobs in the state are related to agriculture.

“It’s just good business sense to take care of your No. 1 industry,” he said. “You would spend $100 million to keep a basic industry intact so that that industry can continue to pay taxes and provide jobs so that we will have funds available to support our social programs, our research programs.”

Other referendums approved last November included a $65.2-million bond issue to help preserve open space in Rhode Island.

Overwhelming Approval

And New Jersey voters, in their second referendum on the issue in six years, overwhelmingly approved raising the state’s share for farm development buyouts to 80%, making it easier for counties with limited funds to become partners.

Arthur R. Brown Jr., secretary of the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, considers farmland preservation his top priority since such land in New Jersey has dropped from 2 million acres to 850,000 acres in the last 20 years.

“We’re protecting a non-renewable resource, which is land,” he said. “The citizens of New Jersey are . . . behind keeping agriculture here in the Garden State. And they’re willing to pay for it.”

The trend toward preservation of farmland appears to be gaining priority beyond the Northeast. “The idea has begun to catch on,” said American Farmland’s Riggle.

Californians will vote June 7 on a referendum for $776 million to preserve open space, including farmland, greenbelts and parks. The bond issue is the first in 74 years to be placed on the ballot by voter petition rather than by the Legislature, underscoring the growing enthusiasm.

In Florida, a state law requires every county to develop within the year a program to limit incursion into rural areas. More than 90% of all open land outside urban areas in Florida is farmland.

A ‘Finite Resource’

“People are beginning to recognize the finite resource that we have,” said Ralph Grossi, president of American Farmland. “Good farmland is worth protecting. In many communities it is the buffer zone between the next city, the open space people like to drive to.”

Riggle said the preservation programs are concentrated in the Northeast because it is the oldest settled region and the states are small, and often mountainous, limiting the amount of arable land.

“The Northeast states have had to confront the issue of urban growth and development versus open land resources sooner than the rest of the country,” he said.

David Meade is one of the Northeast’s concerned farmers. He sold the development rights to 70 acres of his farmland in Howell Township, N.J., near Freehold, to the state for about a half million dollars last September. Developers had offered him more than a million.

“I would only have to take that money and go out and buy another one. Farming isn’t an occupation. It’s a way of life,” he said. “It’s not necessarily something you get into with the idea of getting rich. It’s something you get into because it’s a matter of the heart.”