A Division by Infinity Problem

Divide any number by infinity and you get a number infinitely closer to zero. The Division by Infinity Problem distorts the economics of farming in the Western New York State region: as everyone takes their small piece of paradise to build a home, the land available for agriculture is not just diminished but is divided into ever smaller fragments that are, by nature, less productive and less efficient. Farmers have higher transportation costs for lower yield and higher waste, for example wasted seed, fertilizer, or water at boundaries. Further complicating things for the small business farmer are the increasing multitude of contract agreements to rent land from an ever increasing number of owners of smaller parcels. More contracts mean more paperwork, accounting, and legal work. The value of a simple handshake is diminishing here too. This is where a sale of a conservation easement on a larger tract of land will help farmers, present and future, maintain a productive land-base while avoiding the complications of farming on a patchwork, or rather a crazy-quilt, of land.

Land is property and the right to it is paramount among people’s priorities. The idea that your land or property has value leaves one with a sense of security; a back-up plan for any of several worst- case-scenarios: a terminal illness, an extra hot summer, a disease that wipes out a crop or a herd, or even a child that needs a place to re-build his home. When any of these scenarios plays out, a farmer has to sell his land, and, to make it worth his sacrifice, he sells it for a use other than agriculture in order to receive the maximum value of the land (the total value of all agriculture, development, any remaining mineral rights, and all recreational rights). No one should deny the landowner this.

No matter which generation sells a parcel to someone who builds on it, or gives a parcel to someone who builds on it, or builds on it; the land is forever taken out of agriculture. It is every property owner’s right to sell his land and to receive a fair market value for every right to it that he sells (i.e. agriculture, development, mineral, timber and/or recreational rights). Only in the case that a person sells a conservation easement to her land for a fair market value (the value of the development rights) does the land remain available for farming and can be sold for the fair market value of the remaining rights (agriculture, mineral, recreational, timber, etc.) in the present or any future generation.

Land can only be divided so many times before it loses the character that made it valuable for division in the first place. If everyone builds a house on his fathers farm, and his father’s, and so on, even a significantly declining population will see an end to agricultural land in not so many generations.

Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.

  Wilfrid Laurier (1841 – 1919)

  a Canadian statesman

Letter of Support

Spring, 2011

Statement of Support- Zenner Road Conservation Easement

By Jillian Krupski, Granddaughter/Farm Enthusiast

We’re a farm family. We’ve been sustainable before “sustainable” was a buzzword and organic before “organic” implied a certain social status. In a day and age where obesity is an epidemic, we have a healthy relationship with food and manual labor. We’re American. We’re middle-class. None of us are full-time farmers. We have careers: a chemical engineer, a research biologist, a project manager. We shop at large grocery stores, drive non fuel-efficient cars, and live in 1970’s-era subdivisions. You wouldn’t call us environmentalists, but our farm is our world.

We divide our year by the season: June is for strawberries, July is pea and pickle season. August is for cauliflower and tomatoes. April is spent in the greenhouse, November finds us winterizing the chicken house. We practice farming because we know we have an incredible gift of land to which a decreasing amount of people have access. We do it because we always have. We do it because it is our heritage and because it is immensely satisfying. We do it because we believe it’s incredibly important to pass it on.

Of course this farm is special for one thousand or more snapshots in time: for the myriad summer evenings the pond has given up its sunfish to ecstatic grandchildren; for the 40+ years that the woods have sheltered bands of campers and ordinary families singing like a world-class choir around a campfire; for the simple mystery of filling a plastic milk jug with crisp spring water straight from a hillside spigot; for the grove of pines that have provided years and years of Christmas Trees, for the sugar maples and the sugar shack and a rich warm maple perfume that cuts through cold spring air. For innumerable nights of catching fireflies in mason jars. For teaching brothers and cousins how to work together to get the ATV out of a mudhole or to construct cauliflower boxes at a rapid pace or to move an entire irrigation system in the 30 minutes after ice cream cones and before sunset. For teaching three generations how to be good stewards of our earth.

It’s not that you can’t encounter these attributes elsewhere. This type of tradition binds families and generations across the US; it’s our American heritage. Organic peas, berries and pumpkins can be grown
anywhere. Instead, what’s makes this farm unique is the people it has produced. Two married farmers built a system that produced four generous, hardworking individuals who will testify that their moral fabric is a direct result of their farm upbringing. Those four adults have in turn produced ten principled, productive members of society who choose to spend their summer vacations taking part in the familialbound food production process. We, the human products of the Zenner Road Farm are instilled with sense of unique tradition, responsibility and a tie to the earth that we are determined to pass on to generations in perpetuity.