Farmland preservation

OTHELLO - Conserve and hold. The motto comes to us from an agrarian America when rural folks outnumbered the nation's city populations.

It's barely 100 years since the population scale tipped the other way, industrialization taking over, yet so quickly did the sprawl happen that to conserve and hold has become a rallying cry.

This scenario comes to the fore front when Lynn Bahrych speaks on farmland preservation issues at the Othello Sandhill Crane Festival. She just finished her term as chair of the Washington State Conservation Commission, an organization that has traction with growers everywhere.

Bahrych lives in the San Juan Islands. As attorney she practices environmental law. Her roots reach to a family farm in the Oklahoma panhandle where, she says, "it was my happiest time growing up."

Her grandparents raised cattle, hogs, chickens, and there was an orchard, too. Idyllic it was, yes, and hard work as well, and as you'd expect a lot of remembrances of the 1930s Dust Bowl lingered.

"My mom and grandmother talked about how terrifying the black dust was, how they'd put wet towels over the kids' heads so they could breathe. That dust was like a black fog that killed people, especially children," she said.

Not that the settlers hadn't been warned, Bahrych pointed out.

"Indians told the pioneers not to break up the prairies, and so did the early ranchers. But the government subsidized breaking up the sod. All that had been grass was now a moonscape."

One government response to the Dust Bowl was the formation of the Soil Conservation Service, but the feds were so hated by then that SCS personnel rarely dared venture into rural areas. Instead it was the farmers themselves who realized that to conserve and hold had become a matter of farm practice changes. To that end they organized the local conservation districts, of which 47 operate in Washington today. The one in Othello is a major sponsor of the crane festival.

As for the state conservation commission, that goes back to Clarence D. Martin in 1939.

"He was a popular governor," Bahrych commented.

Less known for the Dust Bowl, Eastern Washington experienced horrible sand storms in the 1930s drought, too, and what made the damage worse were horses left behind by folks who'd grown so desperate in the Great Depression they just walked away from their homestead; fending for themselves, the horses went wild trampling shrub-steppe.

To this day ag dust's a problem here, Bahrych said.

"A new dust storm project, that covers the Columbia Plateau and Basin, is designed to pin the problem on specific farms. Most farms have good soil conservation practices, but there are some where you can actually see their soil blowing away," she said.

Even worse than soil depletion are "impervious surfaces," which is a term Bahrych chooses to describe the finality of development in all its manifestations - factories, parking lots, housing, roads, etc.

The best farms are long gone, because even before industrialization most cities were built where access to waterways was convenient, so lake and river valleys with the most fertile soils were the first to become urban, she said. The sprawl went on from there.

"One problem is that the ag value of a property is a lot less than its value to a developer," Bahrych explained.

A model to save farmland is that of conservation easement protecting open space and wildlife habitat from the expansion of impervious surfaces. "These easements keep the habitat as open space in perpetuity," she said.

A good example are the Nature Conservancy acres in the Beezeley Hills.

Conservation easements of farmland are structured so the property remains private, but must stay in agricultural use forever.

"It's entirely voluntary. The landowner gets cash for the development rights from a conservancy. For example, if the ag value of a ranch is $200,000, but a developer would pay $500,000 for the property, the farmer gets paid the difference, he can look at it as an equity," she said.

Bahrych elaborated that a variety of sources can provide funding for such easements, including the federal Farm and Ranchland Protection Program administered by the Natural Resource and Conservation Service that the SCS has become.

"Last year Washington received over $7 million in federal money for conservation easements," Bahrych said.

King County of course is the first place that comes to mind as needing to be saved from yet more development, but parts of Eastern Washington also are susceptible to development.

"Walla Walla is a case in point," she noted. "The farmland there is really under threat."

Aesthetics aren't the only consideration in saving farmland, she emphasized.

"The cranes are a perfect example of wildlife that needs farmland," she said.

There is a new zeitgeist forming that connects citizens once again with food production, manifested in the buy-local trend which is only possible if there are local farms, Bahrych remarked.

"More and more people realize that we must wake up pretty fast, because the industrial component of ag is failing," she put it. "Pathogens and pests are mutating faster than chemicals can be developed. The conservation commission tours farms in six different regions every year, and what we see on these tours is that farmers come up with good organic solutions to the industrial problems. They demonstrate that it's better to work with nature than against it."

Stewardship, Bahrych said, "is a moral imperative." And so is community investment in farmland.

"Communities are starting to realize that they should pay to have fresh food grown close to urban environments, because the global industrial food system is a path to disaster. Spinach, for example, loses 80 percent of its nutrition when it gets shipped all the way from Mexico," she said.             

A resurgence of interest in land ethic by young urbanites is a hopeful trend, Bahrych summed up.

"When kids go to fields they learn that farm preservation is an important principle," she said.