Can farmland be saved without the farmer?
Environmentalists have long felt a bit schizophrenic about agriculture - love the farmers, hate what they do sometimes, especially if they pollute the bay or sell the farm to developers.
Now the anti-sprawl group 1000 Friends of Maryland is trying a new tack to keep farmland from growing houses. It's decided to extend a hand to farmers, offering to support tax reforms, public funding and other incentives to keep farming profitable and the developers at bay. Under the slogan "Keep Farmers Farming", the Baltimore-based group is launching its new campaign tonight with a $65-a-head bash at the Green Spring Valley Hounds hunt club in Reisterstown, featuring locally produced food and drink, and a chance to meet and mingle with the farmers who produced it.
"We've always supported agriculture," maintains Dru Schmidt-Perkins, Friends' executive director. The group has long advocated for farmland preservation as a key part of the state's Smart Growth policy, which seeks to preserve rural and environmentally sensitive lands by steering development into existing urban areas. But Friends has favored putting more teeth in the state's growth management laws, something farmers have tended to fight because they have more clout at the county courthouses.
Now the group has decided to throw its lobbying weight behind helping farmers in the belief that the best way to save the farmland is to help ease the economic pressures driving farmers out of business.
"There isn't going to be a fresh peach on every (Baltimore city) student's desk next fall if the farmer who raises the peaches is gone," Schmidt-Perkins says. "We have to make farming work because we have to eat. We're not going to get at climate-change issues, transportation issues, healthy food issues unless we have a really strong agriculture system nearby."
1000 Friends isn't the first environmental group to try cozying up to farmers instead of sparring with them all the time. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation made a similar shift about a decade ago, in the wake of a fierce struggle in Annapolis over regulations aimed at curbing farm runoff, the leading source of pollution fouling the bay and its tributaries. The Annapolis-based group, which had angered farmers with its support of the nutrient management law, declared then that it favored helping farmers do the right thing with government payments or other incentives, rather than trying to force them through regulations. Its soft-pedaling of farm pollution issues irked other environmentalists, though.
This new olive branch comes at another difficult time for the state's farmers. They face renewed pressure as federal and state governments look to jump-start the lagging bay cleanup effort by tightening rules on farming while also offering them money to comply. Meanwhile, farmers like everyone have been struggling in the recession, especially dairy farmers hit with plummeting milk prices. On the other hand, the real estate slump has eased development pressures on farmers - though many think that's only a temporary respite in the Monopoly-like march of houses across the remaining rural landscape.
Jim Baird of the American Farmland Trust, one of the sponsors of tonight's bash, has called Friends' overture "perfect timing" and a possible bridge between beleagured farmers and urban and suburban residents who increasingly crave locally grown food but don't appreciate what it takes to produce it.
Farming interests are willing to listen, at least. Val Connelly, legislative director for the Maryland Farm Bureau, said she won't be at 1000 Friends' party tonight because of another commitment. Her group has long complained about government laws and policies making farming more costly and less economically viable. But she offered encouragement.
"We welcome them to the fold," she said.
Schmidt-Perkins made clear in an interview that while her group will seek changes to inheritance tax laws and other measures to help farmers stay in business, it's really looking to promote small to medium-sized operations supplying food and other agricultural resources to the region and state. "Industrial farming is not really where we're going to be spending our time,'' she said, in an allusion to the poultry industry that dominates the Delmarva Peninsula - and accounts for much of the farm runoff affecting the bay.
It'll be interesting to see if Friends can really separate the two. To make it even more complicated, the heartland of the poultry industry, Wicomico County, lost state certification - and funding - for farmland preservation this week. Wicomico doesn't have the most farmland or farms, but the value of the chickens and other crops and livestock produced there is the highest among all counties in the state.
Earlier this year, after a fierce debate pitting farmer against farmer, the county council had refused to eliminate a loophole in its agricultural zoning that allows a home on every three acres of farmland if the dwellings are clustered. The Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation board gave the county until the end of this month to take concrete steps to protect farmland from development pressures. County officials said they were seeking to balance preservation of farming with farmers' insistence on maintaining the option to sell their land for residential development. But despite assurances they were trying, county officials took no action or made any firm commitments - so the board voted to strip state certification of Wicomico's agricultural land preservation program.
This isn't the first county in Maryland to lose some of its state funding for farmland preservation. Howard County, long since heavily suburbanized, lost its state certification in 2007 after balking at downzoning its remaining farmland. Other growing counties like Queen Anne's and St. Mary's are struggling with similar debates and face similar sanctions soon if they don't move to curb the loss of farmland, said Joseph Tassone, coordinator of the agricultural preservation program for the state Department of Planning.
The Farm Bureau's Connelly deplored the state action and said farmers believe the state should leave land use decisions to local officials.
But Tassone said it's not just state bureacrats like him pushing for action, but the state's lawmakers. The General Assembly passed a law a few years back that insists on counties tightening farm zoning as a condition of getting maximum funding under the state ag land preservation program. Lawmakers did so after Tassone's department produced a report showing that farms voluntarily preserved with state funds were getting driven out of business anyway as neighboring farmers sold out and the surrounding fields sprouted houses.
1000 Friends, at least for now, has no opinion on the Wicomico controversy. Kelly Carneal emailed to say the group's leaders were too busy yesterday preparing for tonight's bash to give the issue much thought - but assured they would tackle it once the party's over.
(Baltimore Sun file photo by Barbara Haddock Taylor)
Comments
Americans pollute the whole Gulf of Mexico with bad, but, corporate pleasing, farming practices, effluents from Factory Farms, and humanure from cities! Fvcking Fools! These are all very good bio-gassables for bottled fuel gases, that can save on the foreign oil bill, and stop the black-mail of our forces into mercenary service in Afghanistan, for example, and stop the clearing of the way for a Halliburton(Dubai) financed pipeline to Turkmenistan's Oil fields, even though the fields are claimed by China already! The fvcking bastards want, just like Isreal , to push our nuclear button for us! The other bi-product of bio-gassing is a top-soil enhancing fertilizer! We need that! Corporate interests have used ROI enhancing equations, not good farming practice, to rape the highest return for share-holders, not even necessarily American ones, (likely Asians with "numbered” companies, and registered securities, investment plans!) which burns out fields out for the most cash, as fast as possible!, drains watersheds for faster returns, sent to Asian stock-markets to build those countries industries, and make even more money in the non-devalued Chinese "Yuan" Got your pants on American farm-boy? Tak'em off! You're being raped, up the bare ass, no free grease! Bend over! open your mouth - "Deliverance Time" Take it both ends! Free trade! for foreigners, a pantie raid at your house! Better warn your old lady to change her shorts, the corporatists, and capitalists armed with "Free Trade, and access to Asia's "Wonder Money ", the "Yuan" are about to plunder your old lady, your ass, your farming business, your lakes, fields, creeks and streams, your seashores, and your drinking water for ROI! on the Beijing, Shanghai and Hang Seng markets! in Chinese "Yuan" and your asinine government loves it! They get a cut every time money is churned! You Great lovable American Neanderthals, Freedom Fighters to the world, Food providers for a continent, are being layed victim to voracious predator Capitalists and Corporatists, replacements for the "Old World" cunning and tricky Jewry, who had, at best, some conscience, these new fellows make Satan blush! High IQ's, Good educations, in business and finace, Some legal proficiencies, and hired to rape for ROI! on behalf of investment certificates, untraceable monies, huge, beyond your wildest imagination, They will have your virgin daughters naughty parts for lunch and chew your genitals off your live body for supper! They have already bought Washington D.C. and the Uncle Tom, Obama, they run the militarie's finances, own all the oil in the world, and swapped GM(America) for GM(china) for a 30% profit this year alone! Your soil, Your way of life, Your farm, Your church, Your community, Your water supply, Your housing, Your schools, Your country! All targets for re-sale, turn over, for a percent, commission! destruction in honor of the all-powerful "Yuan", China is winning an economic war on America, and has damn near won it, without a shot fired! Without Military confrontation! The are cunning, skillful, high IQ opponents and are soon to take over control, even the dollar's place in the world! You, the American Farmer, the last stronghold of independence in the land! Stand tall! Don't go down easily! The American refugees of the "Smoke Stack Era" and those left behind by the flight of American Capital to Asia and the "Yuan", leaving "legacy Workers" from Americas once great factories, Auto builders, Steel Mills, We stand behind you! Anarchy is not a nice word, but sometimes, the only way to fight Evil is with Evil!
Posted by: Uncle B | October 25, 2009 2:31 PM