Saving our Farmland
The Next Frontier of Conservation

By Jimmy Daukas, American Farmland Trust 

            The Southeast’s best farmland continues to be paved over and degraded at an alarming rate affecting our quality of life.  This doesn’t have to happen; together farmers and citizens are fighting to save the land that sustains us. American Farmland Trust (AFT) helps these communities develop plans and tools to ensure a future for farming while also working to reform U.S. agriculture policy at the federal level.

Across the nation we lose 1.2 million acres per year—two acres every minute—and lose our best land the fastest. In the Southeast every state is losing farmland to development with Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Kentucky ranked among the top twenty states in prime farmland lost. Additional farmland is degraded by over cultivation and use of chemicals. We know that growth itself is not the problem. Unplanned, ill-considered growth is the enemy.

The impact of this folly is serious: threatening production of our food—86 percent of U.S. fruit and vegetable production is on the urban-edge; pushing production on to more marginal land, requiring more chemicals and increasing soil erosion; reducing wildlife habitat—farms provide homes to more than 70 percent of the nation’s wildlife; and increasing costs to local taxpayers—farmland generates more in local tax revenue than it costs in services. This is the land that directly sustains us in body and spirit; it benefits all of us. It is private land with enormous public importance and it urgently needs our committed stewardship.

So what can we do? Across the country and in the Southeast farmers and communities are coming together to plan for the future of agriculture and mobilize federal, state and local resources to create real options. Based on nearly twenty-five years of experience, American Farmland Trust has found that you need to work on three closely coordinated fronts:

Farmers and citizens in the Southeast, with help from AFT, are getting active to save their farmland. In Kentucky, AFT helps counties conduct studies on the high cost to taxpayers of paving over farmland; in North Carolina, AFT works with local farm groups to expand Agricultural Districts. And in Georgia, AFT held workshops in Carroll County to explore the nation’s most successful plans for agriculture and share ideas about which techniques will work best in Georgia.

Protecting individual farms is only a stopgap without a broader plan. Likewise, saving land only to degrade it with poor farming practices is little better than paving it over. Our experience shows we must succeed on all three fronts. This requires leveraging state and local efforts to conserve farmland with a national campaign to change U.S. agriculture policy.

Current farm policy doesn’t do enough to help farmers protect their land, expand markets and adopt conservation practices. More than 90 percent of America’s farmers received either no subsidies in 2002 or less than $2,000. The vast majority of subsidies go to support the production of commodities such as corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice. However, forces such as trade conflicts, budget deficits, and environmental pressures are combining to make change to farm policy inevitable. As a result, the next farm bill in 2007 represents an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically expand the protection and stewardship of farm and ranch land. AFT is working with a diverse alliance of groups from agriculture and the environment to fiscal conservatives and international trade to make that happen.

AFT’s work on farm policy reform is rooted in our mission of protecting farmland, ensuring a future for agriculture and improving stewardship. To make further progress we must fundamentally reform US farm policy in a way that realigns public support for farmers with things the public wants. AFT’s vision for the future is clear: well-managed, protected farm and ranch lands that provide public goods like open space, clean water, wildlife habitat and a renewed connectedness between the farm community and urban and suburban America.  It is a vision of fundamental transformation where farming becomes the most sustainable way to protect our natural resources—by changing our farm programs from supporting farms for the commodities they produce to supporting them for the way they care for the land.

Working together at the federal, state and local level, can ensure that all Americans will be able to enjoy fresh local food, drive down a country road, drink and swim in fresh clean water, and live in healthy communities. This is the new frontier of conservation.

For more information about AFT’s work visit www.farmland.org.

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