WHITMAN – Town Administrator Mary Beth Carter on Select Board on Tuesday, Dec. 19, followed up on survey being done on farmland of local importance after the town approved a Right to Farm Bylaw at the November Town Meeting.
That vote was taken to make it possible for Hornstra Farms to return cows to the former Peaceful Meadows facility the Norwell Dairy had purchased at public auction.
Carter said a soil survey has been conducted in December by a certified soil scientist with the American Farmland Trust on certain other parcels in Whitman.
“The document recognizes the soils that have evidence of suitability for crop production within a locality but are not classified as important farmland soils in the soil survey,” Carter said. “These identified parcels can now be considered for federal agricultural land easements … funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).”
Under the federal agricultural land easement program, the landowner is paid the market value, less the agricultural value of the land in exchange for limiting non-agriculatural uses of such parcels.
“It’s a good program,” Carter said. “It’s good to have in place so that, if we do go in that direction, we’re eligible for funding.”
She said the former Peaceful Meadows land is probably the only one where the issue would arise.
Farmland of Local Importance documents are signed by local officials and the NRCS’s state conservationist. It is then recorded in the NRCS field offices’s technical guide.
“There’s no cost to the town,” Carter said. “There is no regulatory association, [and] the designation does not affect tax rates and it may not make a difference in preserving farmland.”
Carter said that, just as the Right to Farm Bylaw should raise the town’s eligibility for state funding for agricultural restriction program, so should the Farmland of Local Importance increase the eligibility for a federally-funded agricultural land designation and easement.
“Basically, by having some of these properties identified with the Farmland of Importance designation, it opens up some state funding for the right to farm and, for this program, federal funding,” she said. “So, if the town wanted to pursue an agricultural restriction on any of the land in Whitman … it would give us some funding toward that.”
Other funds that could be used would be Community Preservation funds.
– Tracy F. Seelye