Farmland

Community: Manchester Location: Carroll County Average sales price: $237,000 in ZIP code 21102 (January through June) Notable features: Rolling farmland, cows, horses and elbow room. You'll find homes with generous yards, new single-family houses for less than you'd spend in much of the Baltimore region and an old-town Main Street. Manchester is almost 40 miles from downtown Baltimore, and its ZIP code stretches to the Pennsylvania line.

State officials agreed yesterday to pay more than $2.7 million to buy development rights on about 360 acres of farmland and forest in three stream watersheds in the Baltimore area. The Board of Public Works approved spending $1.6 million to place conservation easements on four tracts totaling 192 acres along Deer Creek in Harford County. The easements will guarantee maintenance of green buffers along parts of the creek, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. In one Deer Creek case, the landowner agreed to accept state payment not to proceed with plans to build six houses on his tract, according to Ned Sayre, who works on farmland preservation efforts for the county.

A dispute over land use among neighbors in Long Green Valley has prompted the Baltimore County Council to draft legislation to permit creameries to operate in agricultural zones. The measure, recommended by the county Planning Board and set for introduction April 20, may settle the debate, waged in court and before the council, between land preservationists who say the law would open the door to factory operations in their midst, and farmers who insist that they must diversity to stay in business.

A ballistics testing facility in northern Harford County has placed nearly half of its property in a land preservation program. The H. P. White Laboratory owns nearly 300 acres surrounding its facility, which sits across Scarboro Road from the county landfill in Street. The company will receive $1.9 million from the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation to restrict development on 136 acres along Boyd Road. Much of the land is leased to farmers. "We want to preserve the farmland that is around us," said Eric Dunn, vice president of the laboratory.

WALKERSVILLE -- The Board of Zoning Appeals of this Frederick County town turned down last night a request by a Muslim group to put a mosque and retreat center on 224 acres of farmland. Though the request has raised issues of religious freedom and tolerance, the board mentioned much more mundane reasons -- problems with traffic and water and the details of the town's master plan and wording of its zoning regulations. The decision came on the third night of the board's public deliberation on the second floor of Walkerville's Town Hall, an event that attracted about 100 residents each night.

I look at the empty countryside around our farm in Cooke County, Texas, and can't help but wish it were as thick with people as when my grandparents made a living here. Until recently, though, the kindest name the rest of the world had for this wish was "nostalgia." Back then, leaving the farm made sense. The economy was growing on an energy-dense broth of cheap fossil fuels. The energy in those fuels replaced that from the muscles of farm people and their animals. Today, one person can grow food for more than 100. A century ago, almost 40 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms.

A big investment firm announces an expansion that includes two new office buildings and 1,400 jobs. Management at the mall, which has seen its ups and downs, promises a revamped shopping center. And developers are poised to build a "Main Street" surrounded by more restaurants, offices and homes - a true town center, they say, for a community more than a quarter-century in the making. Owings Mills, the government-prescribed nucleus for commercial and residential development in northwest Baltimore County, has been transformed from farmland into a home for thousands and, increasingly, into a workplace.

Farmers have a big stake in the special session of the General Assembly called by Gov. Martin O'Malley to close a $1.7 billion state budget deficit. Money for agricultural land preservation would be cut drastically, and funding for cover crops would be slashed if lawmakers are unable to reach an agreement on new revenue sources to close the gap, said state Agriculture Secretary Roger L. Richardson. His warnings were included in a letter to farmers alerting them to some of the proposed reductions and how agriculture would be affected.

The often-delicate subject of the impact farmland runoff has on the Chesapeake Bay will be front and center at a summit this week on the Eastern Shore. The Waterkeeper Alliance, the sponsor of the event, points to agricultural runoff, most of which comes from poultry litter from Eastern Shore operations, as the primary source of pollution in the bay. Organizers say the event is aimed at highlighting efforts by the poultry industry to curb nutrient runoff, alternate uses for poultry litter, and legal, legislative and regulatory methods for reducing the amount of nutrients escaping from poultry litter into bay tributaries.

Most Marylanders believe that development and growth are occurring too rapidly and are affecting their communities negatively, according to a poll released yesterday. The telephone poll, a random sample of 1,000 registered voters surveyed by 1000 Friends of Maryland, an anti-sprawl group, found that most respondents want the state to take a stronger role in coordinating and steering growth to existing communities. Respondents listed traffic congestion as one of their top concerns, and a majority supported spending more on public transit even if it meant spending less on improving roads.