By the time you read this, Bobby Prigel, the only organic dairy farmer in Baltimore County, should have a few thousand more bucks to help catch up on his legal bills.
His friends and neighbors - at least the farm-friendly neighbors who think that a dairy farmer ought to be able to sell his cows' milk on his own farm - will have thrown a party to defray some of the $130,000 Mr. Prigel has had to spend to get his Long Green Valley creamery open.
Other neighbors have not been so generous; they've tried to grind Mr. Prigel down and stop him from processing his milk in the big, barn-style building across the road from where his cows graze.
On Thursday, Mr. Prigel got a big boost in a way that Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith recently predicted he would. By a vote of 6-0, the Baltimore County Council passed a zoning regulation that will allow the fourth-generation farmer to sell organic products from the milk his cows produce on 260-acre Bellevale Farm.
The new law will allow farmstead creameries to - imagine this - operate in agricultural areas. It took an act of the County Council to make this happen because some of Mr. Prigel's valley neighbors have been fighting him and two county zoning board rulings in his favor.
"It is hard to imagine a negative impact stemming from the operation of a family-run organic dairy farm stand in the center of many acres of farmland owned by that same family," the deputy zoning commissioner, Thomas Bostwick, wrote in an opinion last summer. Mr. Bostwick said it would "border on the ridiculous" not to let Mr. Prigel sell milk, butter, cheese and ice cream on his farm. (I think it would be particularly ridiculous not to let the man sell ice cream.)
Locavores and people who care about the future of local farming should celebrate the council's unanimous vote.
Until he gets his creamery in operation, Mr. Prigel will be doing what he's always done: shipping his milk to a company for organic-certified processing in Buffalo, N.Y.
By processing and bottling his cows' milk on Bellevale, Mr. Prigel will cut 360 diesel-fueled miles out of his carbon footprint, make more money, set up his family farming operation for the next generation and make more organic dairy products (did I mention the ice cream?) available to local consumers.
This is what we want and need, folks. We are too tied to industrial agriculture. Every little bit of local farming - fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, even fish - helps preserve farmland and reduces the amount of energy needed to get food to market.
