Even with successful direct marketing of his produce, Migliorelli found that encroaching development was creating economic pressures. He, too, was saved by Scenic Hudson, which paid him for his development rights. He also realized that “what really saves our farms is that more people want local food.” He plans to respond to that demand by growing fruit as well, and by opening a roadside stand. But the Greenmarkets are his mainstay. “If it weren’t for those farm markets in the city, I wouldn’t be farming right now.”
Hudson valley farmers are getting used to their new neighbors, the city folk whose numbers have been increasing since 9/11. “I’m surrounded by forty-seven landowners,” says Isabel Prescott, a community activist who runs Riverview Orchards, in Clifton Park. Few of her neighbors are farmers.
In her rustic country store festooned with American flags, Prescott sells homemade strudels, cider donuts, cookies, and pies that are worth a trip from Manhattan. In the fall, she gives tours to 6,000 schoolchildren, teaching them how fruits and vegetables are grown. She has, in fact, become a master of entertainment farming. She organizes two dozen kinds of parties, including a Victorian birthday where little girls bring their dolls and learn how to make apple pies. In December, she runs a holiday boutique with the Junior League of Schenectady. Riverview Orchards even has a Web site.
“We were forced to change, and change is good for us,” she says. But as Prescott gets more and more creative with her farm-sustaining tactics, she can’t help but give an embarrassed shrug and wonder, “What would my father think?” Hopefully, the previous generations would be proud their children are doing everything in their power to protect a fragile family heirloom.
HOW IT WORKS
Malt is a private nonprofit organization designed to counteract the economic pressures that tempt Marin County farmers to sell to developers. Created in 1980, MALT addresses the problem of farmers being land-rich but cash-poor by giving them a one-time payment to compensate for the difference between what their land is worth as a farm and what it would be worth on the open market to developers. The transaction is called a purchase of development rights (PDR) or a purchase of agricultural conservation easement (PACE) because it places a permanent limitation on the property, meaning that the land can neither be divided nor be used for any purpose other than farming. MALT doesn’t buy the land; it merely holds the easement and oversees it. Owners both present and future are limited in the number of houses that can be built on the property, and their right to subdivide or develop it is wiped out forever.
In return for giving up development rights, the farmer gets cash—from 40 to 50 percent of the appraised open-market value of the land—which is typically used for reducing debt, modernizing and marketing, expanding the farm, or providing a retirement nest egg.
Land trusts are a simple idea but a complicated process. They require cooperation between farmers and planners, private enterprise and government, and a citizenry that values open space and local food production enough to allocate funds for their protection.
Every state but Michigan has instituted differential assessments so that farms are taxed at a lower rate than developed land. Twenty-one states have enacted PACE or PDR programs, which are funded by everything from lottery proceeds to cellphone taxes. More than 1,200 private land trusts have been established around the country, and six million acres are currently under easement nationwide. Last year, though, applications for another $200 million worth of agricultural easements went unfunded. According to Ralph Grossi, president of the American Farmland Trust, in Washington, D.C., America still loses more than a million acres of farm and ranch land to development each year. —P.R.
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