Much has been made of the effort to rescue a 1930s era farmhouse in Sagaponack from the wrecking ball. The Peconic Land Trust wrangled a deal to put the house on a piece of farmland long thought preserved and is now selling it for $2.5 million.
But behind the scenes, away from the hullabaloo over how the house came to be on the market, the Land Trust is hoping the preservation plan the money from its sale will fund will be a new and effective tool in the effort to not just protect land but to bolster the farming community on the East End.
The money from the sale of the house will be used to complete the purchase of 7.6 acres of prime farmland—and residentially zoned property south of Montauk Highway from the Hopping family for $6 million. The Land Trust will keep the development rights and sell the land itself restricted to agricultural use to Jim and Jennifer Pike, who currently lease it from the Hoppings and plant it with the vegetables they sell at their farmstand on Main Street in Sagaponack. The resale price: about $25,000 an acre.
“The huge challenge out there is to even make protected farmland accessible to farmers,” said John v.H. Halsey, president of the Peconic Land Trust. “For the amount of money that people are willing to pay for protected land, farmers can’t compete.”
The Pikes farm 60 acres of land in Sagaponack to supply their popular farmstand. But they own only 5 acres, leasing the rest from a variety of landowners. They would like to buy the land they lease, Mr. Halsey said, or more land, but have been priced out of the market, even for protected land.
Horse riding facilities are big consumers of protected “open space,” after courts in the 1980s ruled they are agricultural uses. Homeowners looking to simply protect the views out their bay windows from a new subdivision moving in are another. In all they have driven the price of land reserved for agricultural use to between $80,000 and $100,000 per acre.
At such rates, farmers can’t acquire land and others are faced with estate tax bills they thought could be avoided by the selling of development rights on land they own.
The trust sees the Hopping family purchase as a general model for a new kind of preservation deal: one that puts the preserved land in the hands of farmers, or keeps it there.
“We’re hoping to do more of these kind of transactions, where we might be acquiring conditional overlay easements on land that is already protected, so we can sell to a farmer at a price they can afford,” Mr. Halsey said. “If the price is $100,000 and the Land Trust can come in with $75,000, the farmer can buy it. It’s a form of subsidizing a sale at a price they can afford. It’s like an affordable housing project, with farmland instead of a house.”
on Jan 26, 2011