NC State Extension programs are helping keep farm, forest and pastureland in production
“'If we don't do something now, we risk losing our agricultural diversity and farming heritage.”
Once Raleigh is in the rear-view mirror, the stretch of Highway 1 between North Carolina’s capital city and Sanford becomes almost bucolic. Glimpses of lush, green pastureland and verdant forests appear through the trees that line the highway.
It seems to be the very definition of rural.
But appearances can be deceiving. The eastern edge of Chatham County and the northern parts of Lee County are rapidly transforming from rural to suburban. Land that has been farmed for generations is becoming housing developments as the metro area spills over from Wake County into its neighbors to the south.
“This county is being overtaken,” said Paul Howard, who owns a 200-acre pine farm in Lee County. “It is going to be a suburb of Raleigh before long.”
It’s a story that’s repeated again and again across the state. In county after county, especially the ones that adjoin North Carolina’s booming metro areas, farms are being replaced by subdivisions.
North Carolina is experiencing the second-highest farmland loss after only Texas. According to the American Farmland Trust North Carolina could lose 1.2 million acres of farmland by 2040, with the state already losing an estimated 55 acres every day.
“'If we don't do something now, we risk losing our agricultural diversity and farming heritage,” Noah Ranells said. “When farmland is fragmented, it doesn't come back together.”
Offering Solutions
Ranells is the Eastern director for NC FarmLink, an NC State Extension program working to solve the issue of diminishing farmland. He and Western director Stephen Bishop offer no-cost succession consultations to help farmers and landowners understand options to preserve their acreage, including estate planning, farm transfers, and tools such as agricultural conservation easements.
NC FarmLink also connects new and beginning farmers with available land through mentorship, leasing, employment and partnership opportunities.
“NC FarmLink works with farmers and landowners on farm transition issues,” Bishop said. “And whether we like it or not, North Carolina is a transitioning state. We're growing incredibly fast. There's a large amount of people moving to North Carolina, and that's putting a lot of pressure on farmland prices. We connect folks to different resources and tools and other agencies that are also leaning into this issue.”
NC FarmLink is at the forefront of NC State Extension’s efforts to preserve farm, forest and pastureland in the state. The multipronged strategy includes workshops and seminars that provide vital information to families who want to keep their land in production.
One such workshop took place in Lee County, which could potentially lose 30% to 40% of its current cropland and farmland in the next 15 years.
“We're seeing a lot of development pressure, particularly in the northern part of Lee County,” said Bill Stone, director of the N.C. Cooperative Extension center in the county. “Folks reach out to us on a consistent basis about what options they may have when a developer comes to them and makes them an offer.”
Experts from NC State Extension and key partners addressed estate planning and long-term conservation for landowners considering the future of their farms. Topics included present-use value and property tax implications, farm succession and estate planning, land leasing, and voluntary agricultural districts and conservation easements.
Imparting Knowledge
Farmers know about growing seasons. They are well versed in crop yields. With the help of NC State Extension experts, they know about the latest research into drought- and disease-resistant plants and how to adapt new technologies.
They know about livestock, breeding and calving seasons, feed nutrition and biosecurity.
But knowing how to get the most from your farmland and knowing how to protect it for the next generation are vastly different. Farmland preservation can be a complex process filled with legal, financial and family considerations.
“Farm transition issues can be very complex and confusing,” Bishop said. “It really takes a team of folks to help farmers with them.”
The team at the workshop in Lee County included NC State Extension experts like Stone, Ranells and Andrew Branan, a lawyer who specializes in agriculture and resource economics with a focus on farm and land succession.
The workshop also featured a plethora of partners including the Triangle Land Conservancy, Chatham County Soil and Water Conservation District, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Land Loss Prevention Project, the N.C. Forest Service and the Lee County tax office.
“There are a lot of organizations that are leaning into this, which is awesome,” Bishop said. “We really try to make the workshop as interactive and hands-on as possible, so it is not an information overload. We want folks to feel empowered to start planning.”
Seeking Answers
Gary Thomas has been farming in Lee County for 51 years, just like his father and grandfather before him. The 70-year-old row crop farmer operates a diversified operation that includes tobacco, wheat, corn, soybeans, oats and sweet potatoes. He grows produce in 19 greenhouses, and has six layer houses producing up to 60,000 eggs daily.
Thomas despairs when he sees what is happening in the county.
“The land is all going to houses and there ain't going to be nowhere to farm,” he says. “I don't know what y'all are going to eat in a few more years. I can survive. I can catch a fish, kill a deer or hog. But there's a lot that can't do that.”
Thomas’s strong preference is to keep his land in production.
“I'm the third generation,” he said. “My daughter would be the fourth and then her kids would be the fifth. That’s already happening. I have one grandchild that's 19 that's come into the farm.”
That desire is shared by his daughter, Mandy Johnson.
“I want to keep farming as long as possible,” she said. “We'd like to keep what he's got now so we have something for my kids and my brother's kids to continue on.”
Through the workshop hosted by Lee County Cooperative Extension, Thomas learned more about estate planning, the rights of heirs, and issues such as the tax implications of bequeathing 800 acres at a time when land assessments are skyrocketing because of increasing prices brought on by development.
“You never know with the size of the farm we got,” he said. “I just lost my mother on Aug. 16 and my stepdad on Dec. 16. I'm the executor of that estate and I know what they're going through. So we need to look at some options of transferring the land over.”
Paul Howard, owner of the pine farm, also feels a strong attachment to his land and wants to protect it from development.
“It's a legacy from my father,” he said. “He was a physician here in town, but his real love was being in the woods. He started this property with 80 acres and then my sister and my wife and I started investing with him and we ended up getting 200 acres.”
Howard, 68, began farming fulltime during the pandemic, continuing his father’s work of planting and maintaining longleaf pine stands while harvesting mature loblollys. The land includes two ponds that support diverse wildlife including beavers, otters, geese, herons and other bird species.
“It's really important for us to try to preserve the natural land that we've been given,” he said. “Hopefully we can turn it back to where it was 200 years ago before we wipe out all the longleaf.”
With guidance from Extension and its partners, Howard and his family are pursuing a conservation easement, a preservation option that allows landowners to receive payment for development values while maintaining agricultural use in perpetuity with any change in land ownership.
“We just want to protect our farm for the generations to come in this community."
Easements are funded by grants from state and local governments — including the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation trust fund — and organizations such as the Triangle Land Conservancy, a land trust nonprofit operating in Chatham, Durham, Johnston, Lee, Orange and Wake counties.
“An easement is a voluntary legal agreement between the landowner and a land trust that restricts certain uses of the property to protect the agricultural values or conservation values,” said Melissa Clunan, land protection manager with TLC. “They retain full ownership. They can still farm, they can sell the land, they can leave it to their kids. There's just restrictions in place to essentially prevent the property from being developed.”
Howard considers it the perfect arrangement for his situation.
“We just want to protect our farm for the generations to come in this community,” he said.
Preserving a Way of Life
Bill Stone often hears tales from people like Thomas and Howard in his role as director of Extension’s Lee County center.
“Typically it is somebody who is truly committed to holding onto their land,” Stone said. “It has not only production value, but also significant sentimental value to them. We hear a lot of stories about their grandfather or their great-grandfather or grandmother, their memories of that land. We can't always put a price tag on why things are important to us.”
Stone and other directors of Extension centers in exurban counties take pride in their state. They understand why people want to move here. They are not anti-growth.
“We understand that development is going to happen, that communities and counties will change,” Stone said. “We want to encourage smart growth where it makes sense, and we want to make sure that we maintain what makes this community special.”
One thing that makes a community special is access to local food, whether at a grocery store, farmers market, roadside fruit and vegetable stand, or through community supported agriculture.
Not everyone sees disappearing farmland as an existential crisis. Food, they say, will always be available. It might come from large farms, whether in North Carolina or another state. It might be imported. But it will be there.
NC FarmLink’s Ranells — himself a farmer in Orange County — has heard those arguments. Even if true, he says they don’t negate the need for local food systems.
“We will never be able to future-proof agriculture to a degree where we're not going to need land to produce food,” he said. “We will never be able to anticipate — whether it's health or some other issue — where food won’t need to be available at a local level.”
Ranells points to the pandemic as a time when robust local food systems were vital.
“As we saw with COVID, the industrial food system didn’t always hold up under the strain,” he said. “The state is almost obligated to ensure some level of resilience at the county level so when unexpected things happen, counties can survive and buffer that effect.”
Extension’s efforts to preserve farm, forest and pastureland also help to preserve an important way of life.
“Lee County did a land use plan in 2018, talking to citizens about what they valued, about why they felt Lee County was such a unique and great place,” Stone said. “Three out of the four areas they emphasized related to open space, to the balance of urban and rural, to that small town community feel, lack of traffic, lack of hustle and bustle. We know that's what people want, and we need to try to stay ahead of it the best we can, to be proactive so we don't look back in 20 years and say, ‘I wish we would've done this. I wish we would've done more.’ I think we're at that inflection point now where we have really got to push and promote these programs.”
Extension’s farm succession efforts exist to help preserve a robust food system in North Carolina. They exist to preserve a way of life. They exist for farmers like Thomas, who place a value on their land far above what they could make from selling to a developer.
“I love the land and seeing things grow,” Thomas said. “It’s in my blood. You get calls all the time from people wanting to buy land. You’ve got to love it and know how to do without money. If you ain't got that, you don't care about the land.”
