Farmland vanishing: Developers paying big bucks for Henderson County property

All around Henderson County, what used to be acres and acres of farmland with rows of crops are now being transformed into construction sites with new buildings.

Sixth-generation apple grower Kenny Barnwell said the bottom line is this: "We cannot afford to farm it for what (developers) are willing to pay for it."

It's usually an offer made by a developer that's too good for any farmer to pass up, Henderson County commissioner Bill Laspley told the Times-News on Oct. 26. Lapsley also wanted to make it clear that the land isn't being taken away from farmers.

"Nobody is taking their land away — they are selling it. The awkward position they're in is that because we are a growing community and it's an attractive place to live, you have land developers who want to build subdivisions and commercial stores.

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"A lot of the vacant land is now farmland," Lapsley said. "You will have a farmer who had the land passed down to him from his family or who might have bought the land for $5,000 an acre 50 years ago, and then along comes this developer from out of the area who offers him $50,000 to $80,000 an acre. You can't fault the farmer for agreeing to take the money and run. He can't make that kind of profit growing corn."

It's a dilemma for farmers who want to keep farming and keep their land and also for the community, where future growth is inevitable, Lapsley said.

Barnwell, who has spent more than 20 years advocating for the nation's apple industry while also managing his 150-acre farm, Kenny Barnwell Orchards, said he and other local farmers who are holding onto their property are hoping to have a farm bill passed soon to help them conserve farmland.

Right now, that potential bill is just in the discussion process, Barnwell said.

A difficult situation

Lapsley said from a community standpoint, the county is losing all of the natural things that attract people here.

"People were used to coming here and seeing farmland all around. As each year goes by, more and more of that farmland is becoming subdivisions, so it's a difficult situation," he said. "We don't want to deprive the farmers from getting good money for their property, but we don't want to see the farmland go away, because we all enjoy seeing it."

Big plots of farmland that go up for sale are bought by developers within days, Barnwell said. He saw it happen just recently.

"There's land next to the historic St. Paul Episcopal Church out here in Edneyville that was sold, and it already has six or seven doublewide trailers on it. There was another piece of land beside me that I've been farming for the past 18-20 years that went on the market on a Friday. They had two full cash offers on it on that following Monday.

"I had asked the guy who owns it about farming it through the year ... he said they were doing something else with it. All they did was push the trees up from the ground and burn them. When I was helping my uncle 35 years ago, we sold the trees that went on that orchard. Now they're gone."

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What can be done?

Barnwell serves on numerous boards and is a founding member of Agribusiness Henderson County, an organization that's working to resolve the problem of the farmland in the county vanishing.

"We are working very hard through AgHC and with the county commissioners on a farmland preservation project. That's something that is coming through AgHC, and we're going to try to make it work," Barnwell said. "I wouldn't call it workshops that we are doing right now. It's really all just discussions. The key thing is that you have to have a local element to put in some money to get it started."

That money could be in the form of grants from local nonprofits, or it could possibly come from county residents, Lapsley said.

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"We've got to find a way to have a farmland preservation program where the community invests some of its money to pay the farmer to not develop his land. The farmer gets the benefit of the increased property values, but in exchange, he has to agree not to sell his land for development. He can sell it to another farmer, but it's always going to be farmland," Lapsley said. "That's going to take a lot of money.

"There's a state program and a federal program that exists that commissioners have heard about and been briefed on, where there are grant programs where the federal and state can come in and pay that difference, negotiate with the farmer and pay him for that preservation or easement. What commissioners have to do is decide if that is working. If we're lucky, we'll do maybe one 50-acre or 100-acre farm in the county per year. That's not going to make a dent in what we need to do."

Lapsley said it seems like the only solution will be to turn to county residents for help, which will also be a challenge.

"To accelerate this farmland preservation program, it appears that we are going to have to get local taxpayer money. We already hear about the tax rate after the revaluation, so it's just not a good time right now to go to the public and ask for a tax increase," he said.

In the latest draft of the Henderson County 2045 Comprehensive Plan, it states that a new program, potentially called Agricultural Preservation & Protection of Land & Economy (APPLE), is needed to protect the essential resource of farmland. This program would enable the county to buy the development rights to agricultural land, thereby protecting it from development.

The draft says it would use a program like the one already established in Alamance County. The draft states that the Alamance County Farmland Preservation Program has preserved hundreds of acres of farmland since its inception.

Dean Hensley is the news editor for the Hendersonville Times-News. Email him with tips, questions and comments at DHensley@gannett.com. Please help support this kind of local journalism with a subscription to the Hendersonville Times-News.

This article originally appeared on Hendersonville Times-News: Farmland no more: Developers buying property as county continues growth