Southampton Town, Peconic Land Trust Make Farmland Affordable

As towns look for new ways to direct the mountainous revenues from the Community Preservation Fund toward the program's goals, Southampton Town and the Peconic Land Trust announced late last month that a young farmer has bought the first parcel of municipally preserved farmland that is protected with permanent covenants requiring it to be maintained with food crops.

Hank Kraszewski III, whose family owns the popular Hank's Pumpkintown in Water Mill, purchased 19 acres of land the town and the PLT bought last year, in what was hailed as the first use of preservation funds to guarantee the land would remain a working farm.

Mr. Kraszewski paid $26,000 per acre, with the help of a farm credit loan, for land the trust paid more than $360,000 an acre for just months ago.

My future goal is to put a farm stand on that property some day, but that's down the road; for now I'm going to grow vegetables,” said Mr. Kraszewski, 22, whose family runs three local farm stands in addition to the apple orchard and pumpkin patch at Pumpkintown in the fall. "This is land that will always be in my family."

In the $12 million deal to buy two parcels totalling 33 acres from the Danilevsky family, the trust employed a simultaneous double-sale arrangement, whereby the trust purchased fee title to the farmland and sold a package of "rights" from the land to the town that would require it remain actively farmed. The town paid $11.1 million from its CPF for the development and use rights. The trust contributed just shy of $1 million of private funding to the deal.

As part of the arrangement, the trust had pledged to sell off the land to farmers at the market value for food-crop farmland, about $26,000 per acre. The trust is still negotiating for the sale of the remaining 13-plus acres of the Danilevsky's land with another farmer.

"It's really a milestone," John v.H. Halsey, the president of the Peconic Land Trust, said during a meeting with members of the Town Board and the Kraszewskis last month. "We've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars over the years to protect farmland. The one thing we didn't do was ensure that it would be used for farming. And that's what these restrictions will do."

The Peconic Land Trust has led the charge to call attention to the broad swaths of land that have been preserved from development, through the purchase of development rights, but wind up as horse farms, polo fields or as expansive private lawns surrounded by hedges.

Hank Kraszewksi Sr. told board members that he has purchased dozens of acres of preserved land over the years, including Pumpkintown, but that it has steadily gotten too expensive for farmers to even try to take on new purchases.

"For us, we started out in the 1990s for about $7,000 an acre for the preserved land," Mr. Kraszewksi Sr. said. "Up through the last one we bought … we paid about $50,000. And we had to dig deep to make that call. Then it got out of control. We could never do $125,000, and I think some of them are way above that now."

Through a 2011 purchase of 7.6 acres of farmland in Sagaponack with privately raised money, the land trust developed a new collection of restrictions that made the land appealing only to farmers. That parcel was sold to the farmers already working it, Jim and Sarah Pike, for about $25,000 an acre.

The Peconic Land Trust then brought the formula for devaluing the land and keeping it as farmland to Southampton Town in hopes of getting the town to direct about 20 percent more than it normally would toward the preservation of a farmland parcel, to ensure that it remained as such.

With the sale to the young Mr. Kraszewski, area farmers said they hope the town will see that if it takes the steps needed to keep farmland available to farmers and out of the hands of those with lots of money but no interest in the community, there will be more generations willing to help keep food production an industry on the South Fork.

"This is a great day for agriculture here in Southampton," said John Halsey, an apple farmer whose family owns the Milk Pail in Water Mill. "We don't want to lose sight of the fact that we are now growing more food. That is the far more important thing than we can do with our land."

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