Ag Preserve Movement Plows New
BYEDSHAMY
Northampton Co. Correspondent
TRENTON, N.J. - Just as the
vultures had begun wheeling over
the top of New Jersey’s farmland
preservation program, the effort
has shown signs of finally coming
to life.
There has been a flurry of ac
tivity in Trenton and in Northern
New Jersey in recent weeks that
has shown the body isn’t a corpse
yet.
And while the 1983 Farmland
Retention Act hasn’t yet lived
completely up to its billing, it has
begun to attract the attention of
legislators and landowners.
Just before Christmas, the
legislature sent to Gov. Thomas
Kean a bill that would allow six of
New Jersey’s most rural counties
to offer farmers low-interest loans
in exchange for the development
rights to their farms. Kean hasn’t
yet signed the bill into law.
In the last days of 1986, the
Hunterdon County Agriculture
Development Board quietly
purchased the permanent
development rights to three farms,
and the state revealed the county
was eyeing a fourth farm for
preservation.
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And Hunterdon’s neighbor to the
north, Warren County, made some
noise of its own on the preservation
front by approaching a group of
utilities about preserving a tract of
the land they own.
There are still hurdles for New
Jersey’s farmland preservation
program to overcome. Some can
be solved with legislative tinkering
and others are a quirk of the state’s
booming economy.
The New Jersey Assembly’s
Economic Development and
Agriculture Committee staged a
hearing near Flemington in late
November on how it could help the
preservation law become more
effective. .
The message from farmers and
preservationists rang clear: Cut us
a swathe through the massive pile
of red tape between an interested
landowner and the purchase of his
development rights and we will
deliver the acreage for farmland
preservation.
Raritan Township, Hunterdon
County dairy farmer Ernest
Kuster, who chairs the county’s
agriculture development board,
told the committee that the 18-
month-long bureacratic maze that
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fanners had to put up with was
discouraging them from entering
the program.
He asked the committee to figure
out a way to speed up the process.
Kuster suggested to the com
mittee, which included the Far
mland Retention Act’s primary
sponsor, Assemblyman Richard
Zimmer (R-Hunterdon-Warren)
that the state and the counties join
financial forces to hire more full
time workers to administer the
program.
Assemblyman Robert Shinn (R-
Burlington) suggested that the
state contemplate contributing 75
percent of the cost of purchasing
development rights from farmers.
Under the existing law, the state
and counties split the cost of
buying the development rights.
Municipalities are free to con
tribute to the counties’ share,
though few have done so.
It was left to the state’s
Secretary of Agriculture, Arthur
R. Brown Jr., to advise the
Assembly committee of the sober
reality of the farmland preser
vation program. It will soon need
more money.
The state is now using $5O million
in bond money approved by voters
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in 1981 to pay its share of
development rights purchases.
But New Jersey’s healthy
economy has driven the price of
farm real estate above $3,500 per
acre; on the average, higher than
any other state in the country.
Brown declined to put a price tag
on the program, but told the
committee a successful push to
preserve farmland from
developers will cost taxpayers a lot
of money.
The quickened pace of
development has taken its toll in
Warren County, where county
freeholders found their facilities
inadequate and had to build a new
county jail and a new ad
ministration building.
The county also financed the
construction of a $45 million
energy-from-refuse plant New
Jersey’s first to combat growing
solid waste disposal woes.
Freeholders have been reluctant
to seek more bond money to fund
farmland preservation in the
heavily rural county, despite a
non-binding referendum in 1983 in
which voters overwhelmingly
approved $3 million for the
program.
Low Interest Loans
The freeholders asked the
Warren County Agriculture
Development Board to devise a
less costly strategy, and the board
came up with the idea of loaning to
farmers, at low interest, enough
money to buy farmland.
In exchange for the loans, the
farmers would agree to forever
prohibit development on the land.
The revolving loan fund could be
used to help more farmers com
pete with developers in the bidding
for the county’s diminishing far
mland.
There was only one catch to the
plan. Counties in New Jersey were
not permitted to loan money to
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Zimmer sponsored legislation in
the Assembly and State Sen.
Wayne Dumont Jr. (R-Warren-
Sussex) sponsored the bill in the
Senate that would clear the way for
the preservation loans.
While the Warren development
board waited for Gov. Kean to sign
the bill which would allow
Warren, Hunterdon, Sussex,
Gloucester, Cumberland and
Salem counties to offer the loans
it opened a new front on the
preservation push.
The board asked the Merrill
Creek Owners Group to voluntarily
enroll about 100 acres of farmland
it owns in Harmony Township in
the farmland preservation
program.
The proposal, now under owners
group scrutiny, would preserve the
acreage that has been eyed by the
county’s five vocational
agriculture teachers as a field
classroom.
The owners group made up of
seven power companies from New
Jersey, Pennsylvania and
Delaware is building a 650-acre
reservoir in Harmony and owns
several thousand acres on the site.
Hunterdon County was busy as
well, spending $570,000 to buy the
development rights to about 240
acres of farmland in Delaware
Township.
A 90-acre farm belonging to Mr.
and Mrs. Henry Fisher; a 70-acre
farm belonging to their sons,
Charles and Robert Fisher; and a
80-acre farm held by the New
Jersey Conservation Foundation
were officially enrolled in the
preservation program at the end of
1986.
The county opted to buy the
development rights without the
state’s financial assistance to
accelerate the purchase and to
(Turn to Page D 4)