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W 209 Pattce Library
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VOL. 18 No. 29
Francis Kennedy, chairman of the Pennsylvania House
Agriculture Committee and principal backer of HB 1056, at
work in his Captiol office.
Rural Life Expert
To Talk Thursday
Dr. Charles P. Loomis, a noted
expert on rural life, will present a
public affairs lecture and
seminar on ‘‘Agriculture and
Social Change”, Thursday, June
14, at the Lancaster Farm and
Home Center. The event is being
sponsored by the Farm and
Home Foundation.
The speech will begin at 7:45
p.m., it is free of charge and is
open to the public.
Dr. Loomis is Anderson
Professor of Sociology at the
Plowing
Contest
Slated
The Lancaster County Con
servation District board of
directors announced Wednesday
night at their regular meeting
that a plowing contest will be held
again this year for area
plowmen.
The contest has been scheduled
for Tuesday, July 24, to coincide
with the annual conservation
field day. A location for the event
has not yet been chosen.
For local winners, the District
has agreed to pay part of the
expenses to the state contest.
That contest will be held this year
in Hershey, during Agricultural
Progress Days, the week of
August 27.
In other discussion, the board
went over plans for hosting the
annual convention of Nor
theastern U.S. conservation
directors. The convention is
scheduled for August 5-8, and will
be held in Lancaster’s Hilton
Hotel.
Dr. Charles P. Loomis
University of Houston, in
Houston, Texas. He is a native of
Colorado, and is a former
professor of sociology and an
thropology at Michigan State
University.
Loomis has served with the
USDA’s Division of Farm
Population and Rural Life, and
the Bureau of Agricultural
Ecomonics. At one time he
headed the extension and
training activites for the USDA’s
Office of Foreign Agricultural
Relations. This assignment in
cluded work as a senior social
scientist in Costa Rica.
From 1964-1966 Dr. Loomis
served as a consultant in
sociology, India, with the Ford
Foundation. He also served with
UNESCO of the United Nations
on evaluation of literary
programs in Tanzania, Iran and
India; and with the U.S. Public
Health Service and the
.president’s Commission on the
health needs of the nation (1950).
Dr. Loomis has published
widely on subjects related to
agriculture and social change.
Lancaster Farming, Saturday, June 9, 1973
Hearings Set for
Farm Tax Issue
“The people of Pennsylvania
have let it be known that they
want farmers to have a tax
break,” Francis Kennedy,
chairman of the Pennsylvania
House Agriculture Committee,
told LANCASTER FARMING
Wednesday during an interview
m his office.
“We’ve drafted a bill, House
Bill 1056, which we think will do
the job,” Kennedy noted. “But
we’re not going to cram it down
anybody’s throat. We’re going to
hold public hearings, and we’re
going to find out how people feel
about the bill.”
The first public meeting is
tentatively scheduled for June 28
in Harrisburg. There’ll be
another meeting somewhere in
the southeastern corner of the
state, possibly Lancaster County,
and there’ll be another one in
western Pennsylvania, maybe
Butler County, where Kennedy
owns a dairy farm.
The aims of HB 1056, shown in
its entirety at the end of this
article, are to preserve the
state’s limited supply of prime
agricultural land, to prevent the
premature conversion of such
land to urban use, and to
preserve the state’s scenic
beauty by keeping more open
lands around urban
areas.
“Farmers should be happy
with this bill,” Kennedy said,
“because it was really designed
for them. If a farmer means to
farm his land, this will help him
do it. If bis main goal is land
speculation, this bill might make
him think twice about
speculating.”
In order to qualify for a tax
Elam Bollinger, president of the Lan
caster County Holstein Association, has
break under the provisions of HB
1056, a farmer would sign a
contract with the county,
agreeing to keep his land in
agriculture for ten years. Only
parcels of land greater than five
acres in area could qualify.
Kennedy pointed out that this is a
strictly voluntary feature of the
bill “Nobody’s forced to sign that
contract,” he said. “If a farmer
wants to keep farming, he’ll want
a tax break, and he’ll sign. If he’s
speculating in land, he won’t
Elam Bollinger . . .
Going Strong After
28 Yrs. of Dairying
Elam Bollinger has been
milking Holsteins for nearly 30
years. Starting with eight grade
Holsteins in 1945, he and Mrs.
Bollinger have slowly built their
herd up to the point where they
now have more than 90 registered
animals, with 45 head milking.
“When we started farming in
Clay Township,” Bollinger
recalls, “we had no tractor and
no electricity and we milked by
hand. That was back in 1945. One
of the first things we bought,
though, was a tractor. Starting
out was hard then, but it must be
lots harder now.”
Bollinger is serving his second
year as president of the Lan
caster County Holstein
Association, and is a firm
believer in the value of the black
and white milk factories. “I think
spent nearly 30 years building a herd of
top-quality registered Holsteins.
$2 00 Per Year
sign. But his tax bill will be a lot
bigger.”
Exactly how much of a tax
break a farmer might get is so
tremendously variable, that
Kennedy didn’t even try to quote
a dollar figure. The tax break
depends upon the differential
between a farm’s speculative
market value and its value as
farmland. In some areas, along
Lancaster’s Route 30, for
example, this price spread would
(Continued on Page 8)
I get a good return on my in
vestment. It’s not unusual to have
a Holstein milking over 100
pounds a day.”
Milking is a family affair at the
Bollinger farm, with Mrs.
Bollinger and 17-year-old Darryl
pitching in. A pipeline milker
(Continued On Page 36)
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