Land for the future: State, local and business leaders look at ways to preserve rural areas

By David Steinkraus

Saturday, September 23, 2006 2:10 AM CDT

More information on the Working Lands Initiative, is available at http://datcp.state.wi.us/workinglands/index.jsp. Here you will find a schedule of upcoming listening sessions, including one on Wednesday in Waukesha, and a copy of the steering committee's report.

SOMERS - Drive only a little way beyond the borders of Racine, or Waterford, or Union Grove, or Burlington and you see the issue. What were farm fields are graded flat for subdivisions. Other farms are cut into 5- or 10-acre parcels for enormous homes with acres of lawn.

And the problem with this, state Agriculture Secretary Rod Nilsestuen said Wednesday afternoon, is that such land fragmentation and development are undercutting the state's economy and the quality of life of its residents. Nilsestuen and the Working Lands Initiative Steering Committee are talking about this issue, and the rules which come later may affect everything from how subdivisions grow in Racine County to the types of recreational land available in the state's northern forests.

The idea isn't to take away the ownership of private property, said Don Poulson, who chaired the committee. It's to give local governments the tools - like purchasing development rights from farmers - they need to govern development, to encourage plans, and more importantly, it's to ask the citizens of Wisconsin to think about development because, the committee wrote in its report, Wisconsin is at a crucial point. Growth is inevitable, but the loss of farmland and forests is a consequence of how we choose to grow.

Nilsestuen and Paulson came to the University of Wisconsin-Parkside to gather comments on the committee's report. It was one of several listening sessions that being held around the state, and ultimately all the talk will turn into proposals for either the state budget or the new Legislature which will convene in January.

Local concerns Exclusive agricultural zones were once supposed to preserve farmland. The Town of Waterford did that in the 1980s, said Julie Anderson, director of the Racine County Planning and Development Department. Modern farm families, faced with debts and estate issues, find it more profitable to sell to developers, she said, although our county's loss of farmlnd is miniscule compared to other counties in the state.

The majority of people in his area worry about the loss of farmland, said Robert Gehring, a supervisor in the Kenosha County Town of Randall, yet annexation laws give incorporated areas the upper hand. He lives on a 142-year-old family farm. "I wanted to stay agricultural, but the farm above me is on the hill and they want to develop, develop, develop. They're from Illinois; they're investors. I get all the water, so what am I going to be sitting with - a holding pond for the people that want to develop across the road from me."

Development is taking about 24,000 acres of farmland per year, and that's accelerating, Nilsestuen said, and this part of Wisconsin faces especially acute problems. "In fact, the triangle between Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago is the area with the third-fastest loss of farmland in the country, and some of the best land - anywhere."

Wisconsin's forest lands are changing, too, Nilsestuen said after the meeting. In the last couple of years, about 95 percent of timber plantations have changed hands as multinational paper companies sold off their local assets. These companies now make global decisions on investments, he said, whether to go to Indonesia or Canada as well as Wisconsin.

In the larger picture, preserving land for farming and timber is part of a strategy to bring Wisconsin's agriculture industry into the new, global bioeconomy, Nilsestuen said, where we will make products, such as ethanol, from crops. Without land to grow crops, however, there will be no bioeconomy for Wisconsin.

In reality we won't be able to save all the land, Nilsestuen said, but we should be able to save some. Lancaster County, Pa., which the committee toured, has done it. "They've preserved over 100,000 acres of farmland, and they're, most of them, 40 minutes, an hour from Philly - commuting distance."

The committee report suggests a purchase of development rights, a cash transfer in which the owner of farmland or forested land gets cash in return for selling the development potential to someone else, for example a land trust.

For the last 10 years that has been an option in Racine County, Anderson said, but no one has exercised it. "My sense is that in Racine County, especially over the last 10 years, the land values have jumped so dramatically that you wouldn't be able to generate enough money quick enough to buy up the land to preserve it."

What may be needed here, Nilsestuen said, is a transfer of development rights, which is another tool used out East. This is a requirement that a developer who wants to build in one area must buy development rights in another area designated for open land preservation. This keeps farmland in in clusters. "You have a market concept there, which isn't for every area of the state but for high-price land with limited places to go."

"I really respond positively to the idea of clustering and giving a mass of farmland," said Mark Huenemann, director of state government affairs for Case-New Holland. "You identify this farmland and it stays that way. Most farmers are pretty smart business people, and they're figuring out things like high-value crops. And so if you've got a continuous mass of farmland, you've got the option. If you want to do corn and beans in thousand-acre fields, great, you can do that. But if you find a different way to add more value on smaller plots of land, different crops, you can do that."

Move along This isn't a new issue, Nilsestuen said, but we do need to think about it in new ways and not as it has been presented in the past as an all-or-nothing proposition. "If we think of it as extreme property rights on one end and total planning on the other, that's a dead end street politically."

"It's going to take you folks to make this thing move along." Paulson said, "because someone has to encourage the legislators to get in the mode of thinking about this very thing and how we may do it."

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