Members of the Watauga County agriculture advisory board
are attending a state workshop to better learn how to protect
farmland.
The next regional workshop is from 9:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. on Thursday,
Feb. 12, at the Burke County Agriculture Center in Morganton.
The sessions focus on Voluntary Agricultural Districts, a planning
tool that provides recognition of farming in communities.
Brian Chatham, N.C. district conservationist for Watauga County,
said the county has a program that a number of farmers have used,
but there’s potential for more protection.
“This goes along with our farmland preservation now and basically
widens the scope,” he said. “We have one (VAD) here
already, and this helps us sell the idea of a voluntary agricultural
district.”
At the workshops, members of VAD advisory boards and other interested
people can learn from one another how they might enhance their
county’s efforts to protect farmland and help local agricultural
economies develop.
Chatham said there was a statewide movement to help the voluntary
agriculture districts grow so that counties hold easements to
protect agricultural rights, with the goal of 100 counties participating.
Chatham said the districts help farmers protect their rights for
the term of an easement, though participation is voluntary. He
said farmland was being lost to development, and the state’s
economy has been affected as a result.
“This will help protect farmland for future generations,”
Chatham said, with the easements offering protection from nuisance
lawsuits over farming operations. It also gives farmers additional
protection against condemnation of property by governments and
in priority-list rankings for cost-share programs.
Watauga County started its VAD in 2000 and has 300 tracts of land
in the farmland preservation program, with more than 150 landowners
involved. The county doesn’t hold easements but instead has
the farmers enrolled in the voluntary program. Participating farms
must be eligible for present-use agricultural taxation for property
listings and have either 20 acres of forest or 10 acres in agricultural
use. Those with five acres of nursery land or vineyards are also
eligible.
“VADs are valuable tools for helping farmers and landowners
keep land in agricultural and forest production,” N.C. Agriculture
Commissioner Steve Troxler said in a statement. “In 2002,
33 counties had adopted VAD ordinances. Today, 67 counties have
these ordinances. What we really need, though, is for all 100
counties in North Carolina to establish Voluntary Ag Districts.”
The workshops are sponsored by the N.C. Agricultural Development
and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund, the state’s Soil and
Water Conservation districts, the N.C. Farm Transition Network,
N.C. Cooperative Extension, N.C. Farm Bureau, the U.S. Cooperative
Research, Education and Extension Service, and the Southern Region
Risk Management Education Center.
Chatham said he wants to understand the program better so he can
enroll more farmers. “We’d like to be in one of the
Top Ten counties in the state,” Chatham said, saying applications
had dwindled recently. “With the huge development boom, people
were selling their land.”
The workshops are free, but donations will be accepted for lunch.
To register or obtain more information, contact Holly Gilroy at
the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services at (919)
733-7125 or holly.gilroy@ncagr.gov. For more information on the
farmland preservation program, contact the N.C. Soil and Water
Conservation District at (828) 264-0842.
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