What I Learned in Lancaster County, Pa. Agri-View: Capitol News

Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part series on The Ultimate Land Use Study Tour, an educational tour that examined innovative land use implementation tools in Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The tour was coordinated by UW-Extension and took place Oct. 15-20. There were 50 participants from Wisconsin. This article was written by Dick Cates, a beef producer, member of the DATCP citizen Board of Directors and director of the Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers.

Early the first morning in Lancaster County, Pa., David Sarley, chairman of Penn Township, spoke to us. Sarley, a burley, straight-talking cop who served 26 years on the Pennsylvania police force, grew up in the city. It was steel, he told us, which supported his family and the families of everyone he knew for generations, as long as anyone could remember. But one day Pennsylvania and America blinked; and the mills were gone, forever.

Since taking on the role of Township Chairman, Sarley has taken up the gauntlet of saving farmland with a vengeance, because he has seen what complacency can lead to. In a voice choked with emotion, he challenged our group: “Agriculture is America’s soul; are we willing to have it paved over?” if we don’t work passionately, ceaselessly, to preserve our working lands, then like the steel mills, they will go away, forever.

Compare Lancaster County, Pa., to Dane County, Wis. Both can boast of world-class soils; Lancaster has 20 percent less land base and 10 percent more people; but both counties have the same percentage of land - 67 to 69 percent retained as farmland. In a nutshell, Lancaster County is preserving farmland better than we are in Wisconsin.

Efforts to preserve working lands in Pennsylvania began in 1980 when a farmer named Amos Funk led a group to successfully create the Lancaster County Preservation Board with the idea of purchasing development rights from willing landowners. It was almost five years later that the Lancaster County Preserve Board had enough money to make its first purchase, and that at a mere $250 an acre.

Pennsylvania has now preserved for perpetuity more than 400,000 acres of farmland; 1,000 farms and 78,000 acres of working land in Lancaster County alone. Development rights under purchase of development rights programs (PDR) are selling now at nearly $3,000 an acre, and at any one time more than 200 land owners are on the waiting list for the opportunity.

As we learned in the first article in this series (by Mike Koles on Nov. 6), a PDR program is synonymous with what the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection is calling a Purchase of Agricultural Conservation Easement (PACE). PACE is one of the strategies currently being proposed by DATCP as part of the Working Lands Initiative. The American Farmland Trust is also spearheading efforts to get a PDR program established here in Wisconsin.

In Lancaster, we met folks passionate and dedicated to working lands preservation all along our journey. We heard from leaders of the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners, County Agricultural Preserve Board, and the Lancaster (private) Farm Land Trust; from developers and from the Pennsylvania deputy director of agriculture. We visited farms - beautiful, productive farms - and heard from farmers and farm families as they spoke to us with pride of their business, home and their farm land protected forever. Everyone told us the same thing: Now is the time to protect your farmland.

On the tour bus we rolled through miles and miles of beautiful farmland. Dairying is the principal enterprise in the region - farms with from 30 to more than 1,500 cows. Pennsylvania is second in number of licensed dairy herds and fifth in milk production in America. Lancaster County is also home to one of the largest Amish and Mennonite populations in the country.

As we journeyed from community to community, one thing became pleasantly clear: Where housing ended, farmland began - period. That contrasts with a sight that is becoming more and more familiar in Wisconsin - one or two homes per 35-40 acres across the countryside. A local developer told our group, “Farmland preservation is not about prohibiting growth and development; it is about allowing and supporting growth in the right areas.” Now that’s collaboration that we can all live with.

Early in the day we visited the Hess family farm in Maytown, a beef steer feeding operation with all 300-plus acres preserved through the sale of development rights. We stood on the edge of one of the family’s 200-plus bushel per acre corn fields as we listened to Dwight Hess share his impassioned story. He got involved at the start of the farmland preservation effort in the mid-1980s, and he’s in for the long haul. He asked us to consider, “What right do I have to say the buck stops here as far as the future of agriculture goes?” That is, to choose to sell his extraordinary farmland for development.

Dwight told us that farmland preservation has strengthened agriculture as an economic engine in Lancaster County because it has given farmers and agribusinesses the confidence to make investments for the future. And farmland preservation has insured sufficient working land for environmentally sound manure nutrient management, another important outcome.

Next stop, the Brubaker extended family farm at Mt. Joy, a model of a successful larger-scale dairy farm. The family milks more than 750 cows, with an expansion under way. Luke Brubaker, the family’s patriarch, is chairman of the Lancaster Farm Service Agency Board, and a member of the Pennsylvania Milk Marketing Board. Luke and his wife Barbara are members of the Mt. Joy Mennonite Church.

The Brubaker family is fully engaged in land preservation leadership at the state and local level, and their 1,000 acres of farmland are preserved (with PDR/PACE) into perpetuity. The sale of development rights has effectively allowed Luke and Barbara to pass the farm on to their several sons, the next generation, who are actively engaged in managing the farm operation.

In addition to a beautiful herd of cattle and productive farmland, the Brubakers are selling electricity generated from the methane digester they recently installed on their farm. Their utility company earned valuable green credits by buying the Brubaker’s “green electricity,” and so is paying the family a premium, more than the cost for the Brubakers to buy their energy back from the undifferentiated grid.

Our whole busload had lunch in the Brubaker farmhouse, tables and chairs were set up across most of the first floor’s living space; this was hospitality beyond the call of duty.

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