Farmland at Risk: The Need For Comprehensive Land-Use Policy
Photo by Michael Piazza
Growing interest in local foods has prompted a resurgence in awareness of Massachusetts’ agricultural economy. Many shoppers view their purchases of produce, meat and dairy products directly from farmers as an investment in the state’s farms, a way of protecting the farm operations themselves, as well as the land and other environmental resources they steward. Even for urban eaters for whom farms aren’t part of their daily landscape, the image of rolling fields and rows of crops is part of their farmers market purchase.
Those picturesque fields are under threat, though, and with them our state’s ability to produce food. Development of housing and infrastructure, along with environmental impacts such as soil degradation, have reduced the amount of farmland in the state, driving prices of remaining land higher. Broader challenges to the farming industry—such as a lack of succession planning for aging farmers, high input prices, climate change and a competitive market that favors larger-scale production than Massachusetts has capacity for—threaten farm viability in general, often leading to the sale of portions of farmland in order to sustain operations, or even of entire farms that are then lost forever.
As a result, between 2007 and 2017 Massachusetts saw the conversion of nearly 16,000 acres or 8% of its productive cropland to other uses. During those 10 years an average of more than four acres per day were lost to development, infrastructure and other purposes, most likely never to return to active agricultural production. American Farmland Trust’s publication Farms Under Threat ranks Massachusetts sixth in the nation in terms of farmland loss from 2001–2016, and ninth in terms of continued threats to farmland into the future.
The most obvious and immediate impact of the loss of farmland is the shuttering of farms. The agricultural industry represents $7 billion in economic impact each year in Massachusetts, and provides jobs for more than 36,000 people. As farms close those jobs are lost, and that money spent on agricultural products goes out of state instead of recirculating through our local economy.
That loss of production capacity also diminishes food security for Massachusetts residents. As evidenced by the COVID pandemic, the drought and fires in the country’s largest food-producing states and the recent ransomware attack on the meat-processing industry, the larger food supply chains are exceptionally fragile. Producing food in Massachusetts is essential to ensure that we have some protection against those vulnerabilities.
The environmental impact of farmland loss is significant as well. Farms provide valuable environmental services by employing management practices that sequester carbon in the soil, filter and retain water and provide wildlife habitat. Many farms also operate composting and anaerobic digestion facilities, which reduce organic waste’s negative impact on the environment and instead turn it into valuable soil amendments and a clean source of electricity.
The understanding of these losses is not new and has not gone entirely unaddressed by state policymakers. A range of laws, programs and regulations have been implemented in the last several decades, aimed at protecting farmland and making it more accessible to farmers.
In the late 1970s, Massachusetts was the first state to develop a program that purchases agricultural restrictions on farmland, paying farmers the difference between the fair market value and the fair market agricultural land value of their farms in exchange for a permanent deed restriction that preserves the farmland. As of 2020, the Agricultural Preservation Restriction program had acquired restrictions on 930 properties in 172 Massachusetts municipalities, permanently protecting and keeping in agricultural production more than 73,000 acres.
Another program, known as Chapter 61A, allows municipalities to reduce the property tax burden for farmers based on valuations set by the state each year. The Community Preservation Act provides resources to municipalities that they can use to, among other things, protect farmland from development. The state’s Conservation Tax Credit incentivizes donations of land to be permanently protected. And the state’s Department of Agricultural Resources has several competitive grant programs that provide resources for farmers to employ stewardship practices that keep farmland in production. The Department also runs a program that makes some parcels of state-owned land available to farmers for production.
But these efforts are proving insufficient to stem the loss of farmland in Massachusetts. Funding for each of these programs is simply not enough to meet demand, and the rising cost of farmland means that the funding that is available is often not enough to bridge the gap between land prices and what farmers can afford.
In addition, many of the programs and laws were developed to address specific needs at particular times, and in the meantime changes in agriculture have outpaced some of these efforts, leaving them inadequate to meet pressing needs for some farmers. Advances in technology and farming practices, coupled with the steady loss of large pieces of land, have resulted in farmers in rural and urban areas producing more food on smaller parcels, for example. But eligibility for most of the state’s farmland programs requires that farmers steward parcels of five acres or more. As a result, many farmers can’t benefit from these programs, in particular BIPOC and young farmers for whom the cost of larger parcels keeps them out of reach, thereby further exacerbating existing inequities in farmland access.
Farmland is not, of course, the state’s only land-use priority. The need for more affordable housing, expansion of solar energy generating capacity, conservation of land for recreation and natural resource protection and other public interests can actually pose a threat to farmland, as the land resources that farmers hold often offer appealing opportunities for each of these other needs. The state itself regularly purchases farmland, in transactions that sometimes take that land out of agricultural production in favor of conservation or other priorities. Too often, farmland is simply seen by developers and policymakers as an expendable resource, an opportunity to put the land to a more profitable or otherwise “better” use. And where these other issues have benefitted from extensive planning and goal setting there has been no such history of comprehensive development of farmland needs and goals, nor has farmland protection been considered in addressing these other issues.
After seven years of advocacy from stakeholders, Governor Baker committed resources this year to the development of a state farmland action plan that will identify and assess the challenges facing farmland, set state goals for protection and access and determine the resources needed to reach those goals. With a thorough and thoughtful process, this effort could represent a step toward reversing the loss of farmland, if the recommendations are supported with the funding and policy commitments necessary to protect this nonrenewable resource.
This op-ed appeared in the Fall 2021 issue.
