One of the things that makes our area a great place to live is an ideal balance of the urban and rural, combining an ease of access to amenities and modern conveniences, while also allowing us to enjoy and benefit from plentiful open space, pastoral landscapes and agricultural working lands.
In order to maintain this balance, however, it’s important that we all reflect on what we value and how we’d like to grow as a community. In order to achieve this vision, particularly as we feel increased pressure from development all around us, proactive public policy, strategic land use planning and thoughtful investment will all have significant impacts on the future profile of our county.
The Lee County Commissioners recently took a bold step in committing to the future of agricultural and open lands across the county, establishing an “Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation Fund”. The newly established fund will take the deferred taxes from land taken out of agricultural use and reinvest these dollars into farmland preservation. These funds will be earmarked for landowner costs associated with conservation easement projects. Conservation easements offer landowners a voluntary way to protect their land in perpetuity, and in many cases, allow landowners a viable financial alternative to selling the land for development. Landowners retain private ownership of the land, with the legal understanding that the land will forever remain in agricultural use.
The board also voted to update the existing farmland preservation ordinance, a document that was last revised in 2013. Along with maintaining their commitment to the Voluntary Agricultural District (VAD) program, the board added the option for landowners to participate in the Enhanced Voluntary Agricultural District (EVAD), a program that requires a ten-year irrevocable commitment from the landowner to agree to keep the land in agricultural use. The new ordinance also allows farms that are smaller than five acres the opportunity to qualify for the benefits of both the VAD and the EVAD program, recognizing the changing dynamics of local agriculture and an emergence of more small farms in the county.
If you are a farmer or landowner interested in learning more about conservation easements or would like to potentially enroll your land in the VAD or EVAD programs, please give me a call at 919-775-5624.
Bill Stone is the County Extension Director at North Carolina Cooperative Extension in Lee County.
