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Winter 2000 Maryland’s Strategic Farmland Protection Plan By Jill Schwartz Despite the progress made toward saving agricultural land, there is a missing link in most of the nation’s agricultural land protection programs-strategic planning. Lack of strategic planning for land conservation can be as detrimental as the lack of strategic planning for development. Without strategic planning, the most critical questions about land conservation do not get asked or answered, such as:
When these questions are not answered, communities lose more farmland than they protect, and they make poor use of their limited time, money, and political will. This is true anywhere, including the East Coast, home to some of the nation’s best conservation programs. These agricultural conservation easements programs are considered "best" in terms of the amount of acreage they have protected. Most East Coast states are losing three acres of farmland for every one acre they protect with an easement. These same programs are short on money, able to buy only about 10 percent of the easements that landowners are willing to sell. If these questions are answered, communities will make excellent use of their time, money and political will, resulting in a solid base of support for agricultural land protection. In addition a critical mass of agricultural land, one of our most important natural resources, will be protected. The timing is perfect, given the amount of money that was recently earmarked for land protection. In November 1998, there were 10 state, 22 county, and 93 local initiatives on ballots nationwide to fund open space and agricultural land protection programs. Eighty-seven percent of the initiatives were approved, resulting in another $4 billion now available for land protection. But few land protection programs have a comprehensive strategy for how to spend this money. The Solution Maryland's Future Harvest Project is one of the nation's best strategic farmland protection plans. The plan includes a series of computer-generated maps that identify the state's strategic farmland. It also includes a model farmland protection program that provides benchmarks for county, state, and federal farmland program administrators and other policy leaders. Further, the project measures the state's current farmland protection programs against the model program. This policy audit reveals the weaknesses in the state's programs and recommends improvements. Completed in June 1998, the three-year project was spearheaded by the American Farmland Trust and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. AFT is a private, nonprofit conservation organization dedicated to protecting the nation's best agricultural land and promoting farming practices that lead to a healthy environment. CBF is a private, nonprofit organization that seeks to restore and sustain the health of the Chesapeake Bay. AFT and CBF created the Chesapeake Farms for the Future Board and provided board staffing. Delaware is the only state to develop a similar project. The state mapped strategic farmland in 1996, but has not created a model farmland protection program or conducted a policy audit. Several other states and local governments are beginning to discuss the idea of duplicating all or pieces of this project. AFT and CBF selected Maryland because the state is home to some of the nation's most threatened agricultural land. Farming on the Edge, a 1997 AFT study, identifies central and northern Maryland as being in the nation's second most threatened agricultural region. Most of Maryland's Eastern Shore lies in the nation's ninth most threatened agricultural region. Regions are ranked based on the vulnerability of their high quality soils to urban sprawl. Farming on the Edge showed that no state is immune from development pressure. Every state in the nation has some threatened agricultural land and so the Maryland project serves as a model for other states' protection efforts. Future Harvest Project: The Maps A series of five computer-generated maps identified the state's strategic farmland. This is the state's "best" land, as defined by the project's advisory board. In most states, the "best" land is defined almost exclusively as land with prime or unique soils. Purchase of agricultural easement programs, for instance, usually give highest priority to acquiring easements on farms that have the best soils. But this process ignores the fact that agricultural land has many important assets: including environmental, economic, cultural, historic, and scenic assets. Agricultural land, for example, can be valuable because it is nice to look at, provides habitat for important species, helps reduce floods, helps maintain safe water, or provides soil to grow crops and raise livestock. Obviously, agricultural land protection programs should not use soils data as the only criterion for determining which farms to protect. For the Maryland project, the advisory board decided that the most important assets of farmland are:
This process of deciding which assets are the most important is a major step toward identifying strategic farmland. Determining the quality of land to protect is key. Next, planners need to determine the quantity of land to protect. Given the intense competition for land in our society, saving all of the high-quality land is unfeasible. Instead, communities should focus on saving the best of the best land. This is the community's strategic farmland. Maryland defined its strategic farmland as having one or more of the following:
Choosing the proper quantity of land is politically astute, because you are being realistic and not trying to exclude all non-farm uses. Agricultural preservation in this model still leaves room for development, as long as it is not on the high-quality land. Preservation also benefits the environment and the economy, because farming and ranching the best land requires lower levels of energy, fertilizer, chemicals, and labor per unit of output. After determining the proper quality and quantity of land to protect, a geographic information system was used to create maps that identified the best land. For the Maryland project, the advisory board worked with GIS consultants Earth Satellite Corporation in Rockville, Maryland, and Land Stewardship Services in Fort Collins, Colorado, to produce a series of statewide and county-level maps. For each of the assets described above, they produced one map, i.e. a soils map, a residential development map, etc. They also created a final, overlay map that identified farmland with one or more of the assets. One feature was not mapped. Land with a high market value of agricultural products was not shown on the final map. Due to database limitations, these data were available only on a county level, while all other data were available on a sub-county level. The final map, therefore, identified land with one, two, or three important features. There are a total of seven categories. The mapping project revealed that approximately 63 percent of the farmland in the state that is zoned for agricultural use has prime or productive soils; 32 percent has important environmental, cultural, and/or historic features; and 23 percent has a projected moderate to high increase in residential development. Two of these features overlap on 25 percent of the state's farmland, and three of these features overlap on 4 percent of the farmland. Interestingly, the board did not weigh these features. It is possible that land with one, two, or three features is equally as important. It is now up to communities to decide which land they want to target for programs. Future Harvest Project: The Model Farmland Protection Plan Identifying strategic farmland has little value if there is no plan in place for protecting that land. In Maryland, the advisory board developed a model farmland protection plan that is a blueprint for the state. The plan uses a mix of incentive-based and regulatory farmland protection techniques, including:
Simply having these techniques in place is not enough. All tools and techniques must be well funded and politically supported. Future Harvest Project: The Policy Audit The advisory board used the maps and model farmland protection program to assess the current status of farmland protection in Maryland. This provided stakeholders with an objective assessment of how effectively existing programs protected identified valuable farmland. The audit revealed that the state has made some progress but it has a long way to go. Approximately 6.5 percent of the state's agricultural land that has prime or productive soils is protected by easements. Five percent of the land with important environmental, cultural, and/or historic features is protected by easements, and 6.4 percent of the land projected to have moderate to high residential development is protected. Common weaknesses in the state's programs are:
Future Harvest Project: Keys to Success Why is this project a success? Well first, it introduces an innovative approach to farmland protection: an approach that targets resources on the best farmland, while more marginal land is left for development. During a time when the competition for land is intense, this approach is critical. In Maryland, communities have felt the tug between developers and land preservationists for years. Since farmland is usually the best land to develop because it's flat and drains well, preservationists and developers are competing for the same land base. However, because the goal of the Future Harvest Project is to save farmland strategically, these opposing camps are learning to work together. Maryland's Gov. Parris Glendening supports the project as a significant move in the right direction to help him promote the concept of "smart growth." His smart growth program receives national attention and has already used the maps from the Future Harvest Project to target funding for farmland protection. Another successful aspect of the project was the consensus-building process used by the advisory board. The board was made up of individuals who had traditionally worked at cross-purposes: most notably, the environmental and the agricultural communities. Through the project, they learned that they have common interests, and can meet in the middle. The board was made up of farmers, land-use planners, and representatives from the Maryland Farm Bureau, Maryland Cooperative Extension Service, The Nature Conservancy, the development community, and the state departments of agriculture, natural resources, and planning. This project, therefore, has played a major role in bridging the gap between the entities that tend to stall farmland protection. Finally, the project makes it easier for farmers and ranchers to do what they love to do: farm and ranch. The strategic farmland protection program won't solve all of their problems; it is just one piece of the puzzle. For example, it won't change the weather or affect international markets. But it will help stabilize the land base. Stabilizing a large enough land base has other economic benefits. It encourages agricultural support services, such as tractor dealers and feed dealers, to stay in business and stay in town. A stable land base also keeps farming costs down. It can help lower inheritance taxes in situations where the program includes the option to sell or donate an agricultural conservation easement. Critically, the program helps keep land affordable by relieving farmers and ranchers of the need to compete with neighbors who sell their land for residential development and thereby drive up land values. Lastly, a stable land base helps make farming less risky; farmers do not have to contend with complaints from their non-farming neighbors. It protects farmers and farming from newcomers who like the country, but don't like the smells and noises associated with agricultural production. Jill Schwartz is an at-large field director with the American Farmland Trust. Contact George Maurer at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. | |
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