Putting Cropland Off Limits to Builders

MADERA, Calif. —  His family had worked the fields west of this broiling Central Valley town for nearly a century. But when Denis Prosperi tried to sell a small piece of his sprawling ranch to a home builder, angry neighbors rose against his plan to bust their expanse of wine vineyards and almond orchards.

“I never dreamed my neighbors wouldn’t be ecstatic about the sale, because [it would] increase their land values,” Prosperi, 48, said recently, sipping a chilled white wine made from his Muscat grapes. “But they weren’t. That’s the trouble with farmers, they fall in love with the dirt.”

Four years later, Prosperi has found a different way to pay for new irrigation and pest-resistant grapevines for his 640-acre ranch. Instead of selling any of his land, he has joined his critics in a rare compact to save forever some of the best cropland in the most productive farm region in the world.

Prosperi and six of his neighbors last week sold development rights that would have allowed the housing tracts of Madera to extend onto their dusty farmland.

The $4-million deal with the American Farmland Trust is the core of a four-mile-long “farmland security perimeter” on Madera’s western flank. It is intended to block urban construction on the protected properties and push another 42,000 acres beyond the reach of city utilities and a municipal planning boundary. That is an eight-mile-square expanse of grapes, alfalfa and dairy land in the heart of the Central Valley protected from development.

The farmland trust, the nation’s largest group formed to save agricultural land, believes such easements--walling off premium cropland from cities--are the best hope for preserving farmland.

The trust hopes to slow the advance of builders, who are paving over 50,000 acres of crop and grazing land annually, according to state reports. About one-fifth of that lost farmland is in the fertile Central Valley, where explosive growth is expected to triple the population to 12 million by 2040.

The goal, trust Director John McCaull said, is to use an unprecedented flow of about $150 million in state and federal money over six years to shift growth away from the valley’s most fertile land on the alluvial plain west of the Sierra Nevada range.

McCaull figures the money can buy easements on about 50,000 acres of prime farmland and cut off another 500,000 acres from development by pushing growth onto hilly, rocky, salty or poorly drained tracts. That 550,000 acres compares with a total of 6.7 million acres of cropland in the Central Valley.

“If it’s done in a strategic manner, I think it could multiply the effect 10 times,” he said.

With creation of the Madera preserve, farmers put aside their traditional distrust of government--and of dislike for limits on their property rights--to shape their own destiny. They retained ownership of their farms, but sold away any future right to build housing tracts, stores or office buildings.

The farmland trust describes the Madera deal as the first in the nation where farmers have initiated a farmland “barrier.” Elsewhere, farmland trusts have purchased parcels, but not all at once and never at the instigation of farmers acting collectively.

“We believe this is unique,” the farmland trust’s Greg Kirkpatrick said. “And it wouldn’t have come together if farmers ... hadn’t really driven the process.”

The farmland trust sees the support of farmers and local governments to form the buffers as essential in saving one of the state’s largest industries. Crops are worth $30 billion a year, and farm-related businesses employ one of every 10 workers in California. The value of Central Valley crops is greater than those from any other farm region in the world, federal agriculture officials say.

The threat to that industry is clear in Madera County, where the population surged by 40% last decade. With a typical household income of just $31,000 a year, Madera County officials generally have welcomed new industry and upscale housing tracts.

But, at the urging of Prosperi and his neighbors, Madera officials pulled back the city’s legal growth boundary and rezoned the land strictly for agriculture.

At stake, the farmers argued, was a way of life. With no replacement industry in sight to support the region, they worried their homesteads would become yet another suburban housing tract. Agricultural analysts also question the wisdom of shrinking the vast tracts that help assure America’s food self-sufficiency.

“Madera is a success story,” the trust’s McCaull said. “We really have a lot of interest in easements [by farmers and governments] up and down the valley, especially in some of the smaller communities that haven’t yet gone down the urban path.”

Sales of development rights are especially popular with farmers, hurt by a steep decline in crop prices. In Madera, payment for easements ranged from $3,300 an acre to $16,000 for property adjacent to the city. The payments are large enough to allow farmers to stay in business or to retire without selling the family farm to developers.

Madera’s new buffer is one of five perimeters the trust hopes to help set up in farm towns along a 150-mile stretch of the vast valley floor--at Delhi near Turlock, at Kingsburg near Fresno, and at Hughson and Riverbank near Modesto.

Farther north, the Yolo Land Trust is doing much the same on a three-by-five-mile swath of tomatoes, corn, melons and winter wheat between Davis and Woodland. It’s buying easements on 465 farm acres, and already owns them on nearly 500 acres nearby.

Without a powerful strategy for preservation, analysts have warned it’s a matter of time before one city stretches virtually uninterrupted along California 99, from Bakersfield to Sacramento.

“Projections literally show a linear city along the Highway 99 corridor,” said Eric Vink, who oversees the state Farmland Conservancy Program. “But the valley is 50 miles wide, so the real question is how far out will that growth radiate.”

California land trusts have been purchasing easements for two decades, since the Marin Agricultural Trust pioneered the approach in the early 1980s.

Today, trusts in 19 of the state’s 58 counties own farm easements with 137,000 total acres. But that’s only 0.5% of the 27 million acres of crop and grazing land statewide, said Alvin D. Sokolow, a public policy specialist at UC Davis.

Those easements are concentrated in coastal counties, particularly Marin, Sonoma and Monterey. They mostly protect 111,500 acres of grazing land. Cropland easements total just 25,500 acres statewide, Sokolow said.

And in the bountiful Central Valley, where 250 different crops are grown, only Yolo County has protected more than 1,000 acres.

Tulare, Fresno, Kern, Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin are among the most productive farm counties in the U.S., but none has more than a few hundred crop acres protected by easements. “In California, it’s a struggle to get an effective program up and going,” Sokolow said.

Protections also had been lacking in Madera, within easy commuter reach of Fresno, 12 miles south on California 99. A huge housing project southeast of the city (population 47,000) had been in the works for years, until troubling questions on water supply and an attorney general’s lawsuit stopped it.

So in 1998, Prosperi thought it made sense for the city to move west onto 40 of his acres. A developer had offered $22,500 an acre.

But 18 neighbors signed a petition opposing Prosperi’s project, as did owners at an adjacent industrial park, who worried that new homeowners would complain about their plants.

Longtime farm owner Dorothy Campbell was deadly serious when she said Prosperi’s plans gave her high blood pressure.

A longtime member of the American Farmland Trust, Campbell called regional representative Kirkpatrick in Visalia. “When I looked at the situation with Dorothy, I was pretty disillusioned,” Kirkpatrick said. “If Denis had wanted to move ahead, he had all the rights. There was no way to stop him.”

The city’s main sewer line was already at Prosperi’s property line, and growth plans included at least some of his land. So they spoke with Prosperi too.

“I was born and raised with these people; I knew their grandfathers,” said Prosperi, a stocky, balding 45-year-old. “And when you’re 80 years old, you won’t care how much money you have in the bank. You’ll want your neighbors to like you ... to come to your funeral.”

Prosperi bent to his neighbors’ wishes, especially when Kirkpatrick explained that, through cash and tax breaks, the farmer would receive about $16,000 an acre for his development rights.

Yet, all of the neighbors had to agree to sell their development rights to preserve the belt of farms on Madera’s west side.

“There was just a small window of opportunity to do this, because we still had all the old people alive who valued farmland and their way of life,” Prosperi said. “We crawled through that window.”

As a result, the farmers of west Madera are planning not only for tomorrow, but for a future in which their grandchildren will still have the option of rising at dawn to prune vines, harvest crops and taking in the musty, sweet smell of ripening grapes.

One recent dawn, as always, 78-year-old Enzo Petrucci rose early to lead farmhands into his vineyards for harvest. He worked until early afternoon. After school, his grandson, Michael Angell, 7, did a little picking.

“I think this is something we can make work for a long time,” Michael’s father, Matt Angell, said. “I think we’ve truly turned a corner.”