Discouraging news
By Rob Smith /
ecoRI News staff
Rhode Island is slowly but surely losing its farmland. Between 2001 and 2016, the state lost 4% of available farmland to development. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)
Advocates are warning state
officials that Rhode Island farmland is on the brink of extinction as state
farmland conservation programs lose funding.
Traditionally, the conservation programs
run by the Agriculture Lands Preservation
Commission (ALPC) receive funding infusions from Green Economy
bond questions that regularly appear at the ballot box. But the $38 million
green bond approved by voters last year had no money in it for farmland
conservation.
“If there’s no money for this, then really
by the time of the next green bond, there will be no money left at all [for
farmland conservation],” said Diane Lynch, president of the Rhode
Island Food Policy Council and a ALPC member. “The ALPC will
just not be able to do anything, because you can’t sit at the table if you have
no money.”
After accounting for its current
conservation obligations, the ALPC will have $317,000 left in its coffers,
according to the commission. The last time
it received funding was from the 2021 green bond, which included $3 million for
both forest and farmland preservation.
In the meantime, applications for farmland
preservation are piling up. The ALPC has nearly 50 farms it is working with to
buy farmland and furnish easements, but the commission’s limited budget means
only a small sliver of active projects are actually being worked on.
“We’re talking about two years,” Lynch said about the funding gap. “If we were to try to do all the deals we think we’re going to do, we would not have enough money to do them all between now and 2025.”
Next year’s state budget as proposed by
Gov. Dan McKee’s administration includes no additional money for farmland
conservation.
In an emailed statement to ecoRI news,
Michael Healey, spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental
Management, wrote, “As an executive agency, DEM has no role in proposing or
advocating for additional funding for any program that was not included in the
administration’s submitted budget. We have heard from both farmers and
legislators who support an authorization for farmland preservation in the next
state budget.”
Companion legislation in the General
Assembly introduced into the Senate by Sen. Louis
DiPalma, D-Middletown, and in the House by Rep. Michelle
McGaw, D-Portsmouth, would allocate $5 million to DEM for farmland
conservation. Neither bill has been scheduled for a committee hearing as of
this writing.
In a state as small and densely populated
as Rhode Island, farmland is at a premium. At $16,468 per acre on average, it’s
some of the most expensive farmland in the nation. As calls grow louder for
more affordable housing and renewable energy installations, the development
pressures on farmland have intensified.
Farmland is especially attractive to
developers: the land is already cleared for building, and the profit motive to
build housing or solar is much greater than it is for farmland. As a generation
of current farmers contemplate retirement, selling the family farm becomes a
more attractive option.
“We don’t have the same scenario we did 50
or 100 years ago where if you were a farmer, you passed your farm on to your
kids, because sometimes kids are doing different things with their careers and
didn’t plan on staying with the family farm,” said Kate Sayles, director of
the Rhode Island Land Trust Council. “Sometimes when
the money is so significant in terms of development, it’s really hard to say
no.”
Between 2001 and 2016, Rhode Island lost 4%
of available farmland to development, with an estimated farm revenue of $3.7
million, according to the American Farmland Trust.
Over the past decade solar has been a
growing development pressure on farmland, according to Lynch. Agriculture land
is attractive to solar developers, much for the same reason it is to
residential developers: the land is flat, empty, cheaper than already-developed
land and farmers are often willing to sell, Lynch said.
State officials acknowledged these
development pressures on Rhode Island farms in 1981 when they established the
ALPC, with the express mission of slowing down the development of farmland and
identifying the most important parcels to buy and endow with permanent
conservation easements.
The ALPC acts as a central clearinghouse
for farmland preservation. Securing an easement or buying property from a
retiring farm owner can get complicated, involving high-level legal documents
and financing from federal and state programs and banks. When it furnishes a
conservation easement for a piece of property, it guarantees that its deed
restrictions will only ever allow it to be farmland, forever.
Rhode Island is estimated to have 50,000
acres of farmland, and since 1985 the ALPC has preserved 8,000 acres across 124
individual farms.
For Lynch, farm preservation is the key to
bolstering food security. Farms saw a big bump in business in local customers
during COVID, Lynch said, because of the supply-chain disruptions brought on by
the pandemic. She sees the local food system complementing the existing industrial
food supply chains.
“If you really want meat that is produced sustainability or in an environmentally sustainable way, you are probably going to turn to a local meat farmer,” Lynch said.
“You’re not going to get it from
whatever JBL is doing out in Iowa, and it’s the same thing with freshness.
Global supply chains have to be in transit for weeks, and it’s just not that
fresh. It can’t be.”
Keeping farmland as farmland is a key goal
of many of Rhode Island’s land trusts, as farmland is better for the
environment than many of the residential or commercial subdivisions that may go
up in its place.
Well-managed farms can
provide food and shelter to wildlife, help control flooding and prevent
erosion, protect wetlands, watersheds and air quality, and improve the overall
health of local soil.
State officials may also leave federal
dollars on the table. The Inflation Reduction Act sets aside $370 million for
energy and climate change spending and is expected to include money for
sustainable agriculture that states will be required to match.
“Voters in the state of Rhode Island are all in for the environment,” Sayles said. “But when we get stuck and we don’t have [money] for the line item, what are we going to do?”