Farmland

This Howard County movie has played before: the County Council considering laws to restrict rural land development, farmers staging a tractor parade protesting what they see as an attack on their property values, public officials saying preservation efforts would only push landowners into the arms of developers. Scenes from farmland development fights of 1985 and 1988 have unfolded again lately, albeit with fewer tractors in the parade, fewer farmers in the dispute and about half as much farmland to argue about.

Howard County Executive Ken Ulman probably never expected the first veto of his six years in office to involve a land use bill, particularly one that he was compelled to seek by state law. But that's what happened, and between now and Monday it's up to his administration to pick up the pieces of what should have been a no-brainer - a local ordinance to preserve farmland and open space in the western end of the county. First, a bit of history. Remember concern over septic systems and the health of the Chesapeake Bay?

Two Carroll commissioners have reached a compromise on revising a contentious zoning ordinance that led the Maryland Department of Planning to threaten to cut the county's coveted land preservation funds. Commissioners Donald I. Dell and Julia Walsh Gouge said their proposed revisions, particularly one calling for clustering building lots on the least productive or untillable parcels of farmland, should be palatable to the state. Clustering building lots would leave more space open, and directing construction to untillable land would reduce the number of lots available for development.

This Howard County movie has played before: the County Council considering laws to restrict rural land development, farmers staging a tractor parade protesting what they see as an attack on their property values, public officials saying preservation efforts would only push landowners into the arms of developers. Scenes from farmland development fights of 1985 and 1988 have unfolded again lately, albeit with fewer tractors in the parade, fewer farmers in the dispute and about half as much farmland to argue about.

Harford County's farmland preservation bill died a silent death last week as a divided county council declined to vote on the controversial measure that could shape land use into the next century. That was appropriate, given the belated opposition and reservations voiced by those who would be most affected, Harford's working farmers.Despite the lamentations of the county executive, the Rural Plan will be resurrected in November and the council should then act on the amended bill. Aims of the plan are laudable, and the two years of molding the proposal were not wasted.

HOW MUCH land does a man need?" That was the perplexing question asked in the classic Tolstoy short story of the same name. The central character, Pakhom, eventually found his answer the hard way. Land represented wealth in the 19th-century Russian story, land for farming, of course. And so it does today. City dwellers must have looked with envy at the recent federal Agriculture Department survey showing that Maryland agricultural land was the fifth most expensive in the nation. A farm acre in the Free State averaged $3,500 last year, compared with a mere $1,050 as the national (continental)

Restoring the health of the Chesapeake Bay will require a healthy agricultural economy in the region, according to a new report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation that encourages all Marylanders - including city dwellers - to take a role in the effort to maintain farmland. "The loss of farms and forest land endangers the fabric of rural life, local economies and the health of the region's rivers, streams and the Chesapeake Bay," says the report, which was written by Lee Epstein, director of the foundation's lands program.

Harford County's proposed Rural Plan aims to please everyone: non-farmers, by preserving vanishing farmland for the community's heritage; government officials, by directing growth to minimize investments in new public facilities, and farmers, by paying them to keep their land in farming.It's a laudable objective for a rapidly growing county that has lost a third of its agricultural land in the last 25 years to housing, shopping centers and industrial construction. Although it is only a policy guideline for future laws, this document will shape Harford land use well into the next century.

Members of the state Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation got a good look at the jewel in their farmland protection crown yesterday during a tour of some preserved areas in northwestern Carroll County."

High farmland prices - already considered the biggest threat to the future of Maryland agriculture - are continuing to rise as land becomes scarcer. Driven by one of the hottest real estate development markets in the nation, Maryland farmland value rose 12.7 percent last year to $8,900 an acre, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey. That figure is for land that is sold and continues to be used for farming, an increasingly uncommon scenario in Maryland, say state agriculture officials.

Run by three county commissioners instead of a county executive, Howard County was a different place in the early 1960s. As required of all counties by the Maryland General Assembly in 1953, Howard had finally approved its General Plan in 1960, a much-heralded document based on local officials' recognition that the county was "ripe for development," said Barbara Kellner, manager of the Columbia Archives. Soon after, Charles Miller, J. Robert Black and David Force banded together to run for office on a no-growth platform and won their seats on Nov. 2, 1962.

If you are looking for a group of people that have an appreciation and deep love for the beauty of Howard County farmland, you need not look any further than the Mullinix family. I sit with my father on our front porch in Dayton every season as we're both rendered speechless by the beautiful sunset before us. At these moments I can't imagine anyone being so lucky, so fortunate as to enjoy this amazement. From our front porch I sit in awe of property that my family has owned for as long as I have lived.

As state and local officials weigh Maryland's first request by any farmer to reclaim development rights voluntarily sold to the state decades ago, preservation advocates and state planners warn that permissive zoning in some rural counties threaten to erode the state's remaining open space. The Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation is holding a public hearing at 6 p.m. Thursday (11/15) at the Howard County Fairgrounds on the requests by a partnership of three county farmers, Mike, Steve and Mark Mullinix, to terminate easements barring development on three farms they operate with a combined 490 acres.

There have been Mullinixes farming in western Howard County for more than a century. Nearly three decades ago, as a mark of their commitment to working the land, the family sold the development rights on their farms to the state of Maryland. Now, though, brothers Mike, Stephen and Mark Mullinix say they want out. Not out of farming, necessarily, but out from under a state program that limits how they can use their land - a move that worries preservationists. "We're trying to generate income from other things, and [state officials are]

Attorneys for the Johns Hopkins University on Monday filed a motion for summary judgment in a lawsuit claiming the university is violating a land-use agreement it signed with a Montgomery County family more than 20 years ago. Elizabeth Beall Banks and her siblings sold 108 acres of their family's Belward Farm to the university in 1989 under specific stipulations, including that the property be used for research or education purposes. The suit, led by Banks' nephew John Timothy Newell, claims Hopkins' plans to construct high-rise buildings on the land violate the agreement and are out of line with what Banks and her siblings were told would be a low-rise campus.

In what some see as a critical test of a recent Smart Growth law, environmental groups and some property owners have filed suit to overturn the recent decision by Queen Anne's County's commissioners to zone 525 acres of Eastern Shore farmland for development. The suit, filed Thursday in Centreville, charges that the commissioners violated state law Nov. 8 in narrowly approving rezoning of four farm tracts, two of them in the headwaters of the Wye River and one in the Choptank River watershed.

Farmland is becoming a hot investment property in most regions of the country.The popularity of farmland as a potential investment has grown dramatically among pension funds and other institutional investors during the past two years, according to Murray R. Wise, president of Westchester Group, Inc., a farmland marketing consulting and management organization."

Under a new regulation, counties with state-certified agricultural land preservation programs will keep more of their local tax revenue obtained from agricultural land sales and apply that money to preserving more farmland.Previously, counties would keep a third of the revenue from the transfer tax on agricultural land and send the rest to a state fund for purchasing development rights to farmland. Under the new regulation approved Tuesday by the Joint Committee on Adminstrative, Executive and Legislative Review, counties would keep three-quarters of that revenue.

Maxine and Robert Walker have worked to restore their historic Woodbine farm since they bought it in 1994. Their latest project is to replace the rotting wood on the side of their old yellow barn after rebuilding the stone foundation and replacing the tin roof. To help pay for renovations at Harwood Horse Farm, they want to rent out part of their land for private parties and open an antiques store in an old shed. As they've sought approval from Howard County, though, the Walkers have lost friends, they say. Neighbors along quiet Jennings Chapel Road have fought for five years to stop them, pointing to the threat of traffic, litter and growing commercialization.

Staking out one of his legislative priorities in this year's General Assembly, Gov. Martin O'Malley argued Monday that rural development using septic systems needs to be curtailed to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay and to preserve the state's remaining farmland from suburban sprawl. O'Malley joined with environmental activists and green-leaning lawmakers to defend the bill he has introduced, which would ban any new major housing projects on septic. It also would require less-polluting but more costly septic systems on smaller housing developments or individual homes not affected by the ban. The governor said he wanted to end a "proliferation" of new housing on septic systems, which allow up to 10 times as much water-fouling nitrogen to leach into streams per household as do homes hooked up to public sewage treatment plants.