Posted on 10/28/2003 2:56:51 PM PST by Lorianne
In this era of urban sprawl, Kane County farms don't last long on the market.
The buyers typically outnumber the sellers - unless the buyer is the Kane County board and the sellers are history-conscious family farmers looking to permanently save their land from a future filled with garages, driveways and strip malls.
For the last two years, the county has pushed a popular conservation program set up to buy development rights of landowners guaranteeing that farms remain agricultural and not residential or commercial.
So far, about $11 million has been spent to buy development rights, and this week, for the second straight year, county board chairman Mike McCoy has accepted a federal Farm and Ranchland Protection Program grant to add to the land-buying war chest.
But as is often the case with the unique conservation program, the money had takers even before the grant papers were signed Monday in Geneva.
"We have invested everything we have so far," McCoy said, referring to the millions of dollars in riverboat casino money set aside for farm conservation. "We have very little left over. There is a lot of interest in this. More than we can satisfy."
The $1.4 million grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture, is being used to finalize conservation easements on 689 acres of land divided among four farms in Big Rock and Kaneville townships.
Added together, more than two dozen farmers representing some 3,000 acres have applied to take part in the conservation program.
Under the program, land owners agree to keep their land agricultural. The property can be sold to anyone at any time but must never be used otherwise.
Dave Werdin, one of the four farm owners standing to benefit from the 2003 grant money, said he's stubbornly watched sprawl move across northeastern Illinois. He'd like it to stop before reaching Kaneville.
"I don't want that to happen out where I live now," said Werdin, of Kaneville Township. "Someone has got to stand up for the land."
With that in mind, he and his wife, Lynette, have agreed to sell the development rights on their 334-acre farm founded 110 years ago.
Natural Resources Conservation Service Chief Bruce Knight, who came to Kane County for Wednesday's grant presentation, thanked the landowners for the decisions to keep their farms agricultural.
He said the preservation program like the one in Kane County make it possible for communities to "find the right solutions for growth."
Farm: More than 24 farmers have applied for program
So, what's to keep the county from selling development rights 5 years down the road? The way I see things (which may not be your way) a small farmer has a couple of choices.
Sell the land at one heck of a profit, retire to a lifestyle that will see him and his kids in comfort for the rest of their days
or ... destroy a market, remain poor and let the continuous eroding of American agricultural prowess cause the farm to be forfeited to the bank.
Well said.
Absent immigration (legal and illegal), America's population growth would stabilize.
After all, there's only so much good land to go around.
And the more people you add by immigration, the smaller the percentage of Americans who can live on the best land.
Which lowers our standard of living.
If America's runaway population growth from immigration is not curtailed, there will come a day when single family homes will be demonized as anti-social and anti-environment, and then punished by high taxation.
Just as they are demonizing and taxing cigarette smoking.
Where high taxes cannot move people off the land, they will exercise eminent domain.
The first signs of this are already happening.
Years from now, when you are retired on a fixed income, how will you pay ever-rising property taxes which will be needed to pay for the infrastructure of the growing metropolous around your homes?
In my lifetime I have seen America's population double, and our freedoms halved.
The counties won by Gore were four-times more densely populated than the counties won by Bush.
And Bush barely got elected as it was.
Runaway population growth from immigration is the single greatest threat to your freedom.
"The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body." Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIX, 1782
"I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe." Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787
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Sell the land at one heck of a profit, retire to a lifestyle that will see him and his kids in comfort for the rest of their days
or ... destroy a market, remain poor and let the continuous eroding of American agricultural prowess cause the farm to be forfeited to the bank.
Third choice: End population growth from immigration.
After all, today urban sprawl is engulfing private farms . . .
Tomorrow, it will come for private homes.
Or would you rather live in efficient urban population centers, surrounded by a population numbed into socialist thinking by the pressures of overcrowding?
We all know government. Somewhere down the line these farmers will get screwed or betrayed.
I think you need to catch up on what is happening in America unannounced.
While you're at it, take a look over at this website How far along are we?
I have no clue what FB's position is on this. Now if you want to know Grange policy? that I can do.
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