Only a few miles from Washington, D.C., fast-growing and populous Montgomery County, Md., leads the nation in saving farmland from development.

Story by Arnold Berke / Feb. 1, 2002

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Maryland farmland (Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission)

"Can you point me to the tomatoes again? I’m lost," a woman pleads to the clerk at an outdoor farm stand not far from Poolesville, Md. "If you go past the pumpkins," comes the reply, "you’ve gone too far. Just go straight." All around her, parents with small children, school groups, and dozens of other daytrippers break the rural repose with their chatter and scurry. This is Homestead Farm, run for years by the Allnutt family as a pick-your-own business where urban folk come out to harvest fruits, vegetables, and flowers—and reap other day-in-the-country values in the bargain, like open space and fresh air. From late May, when the strawberries ripen, through the end of October, when the pumpkin patch has been picked clean, Homestead is a sea of people and produce.

Ben Allnutt runs the 350-acre Homestead spread with his wife, Maureen. One of the oldest families in Montgomery County, the Allnutts have been farming here since 1763, when James Allnutt moved from Calvert County after buying Thomas’ Discovery, a 746-acre spread along Seneca Creek. Ben’s father, Benoni, was born in the big white turn-of-the-century house next to the market stand.

Ben greets a group of women and kids on a church-group outing: "We just saw your mom a half-hour ago, and she said to go see the goats." A ruddy man in his late forties, Allnutt is an impresario in his element, entertaining a public that never seems to stop coming. Soon he is advising a swarm of schoolboys on how to pick apples. "You guys can chew on apples till the cows come home," he says, "and in your place that’s probably never. What we also want to do is keep from knocking the apples off the trees. And that means you can’t climb them."

This cheery show is taking place not in the folds of faraway mountain country but a paltry 15 miles from the Capital Beltway, the fearsome traffic girdle around Washington, D.C. The trip out to Homestead traverses a clot of suburbs, ending in Potomac, a once thinly settled sector of horsy swagger now densified with bulbous mansions on streets with names like Tack House Court. Just beyond, ersatz rural gives way to the real thing, a domain of farms, woods, and occasional houses. Narrow roads with bushy verges squiggle through fields of soybeans and corn that melt into distant uplands. The entrance to Homestead is on a single-lane concrete way called Sugarland Road—one of the county’s few surviving early-20th-century "politician" roads, so-called because they were built past the farms of prominent voters.

Ordinarily such an Arcadia, so near the big city with its rarely denied appetite for expansion, would seem disquietingly transitory. Beautiful, historic, and serene but, alas, not destined to stay so. Why should it? No such American countryside, it seems, ever does. Here in upper Montgomery County, however, what you see now may well be what you see in 10, 20, or even 50 years. Alone among the jurisdictions surrounding Washington, and rare nationally, the county is preserving its remaining farmland from development—and in sufficient aggregation to both sustain agriculture and contain sprawl. For more than two decades, in fact, Montgomery has been implementing bold preservation strategies that, while they don’t please everybody, have gained remarkable support and success. "This is the single most successful program in the nation," says Dan Marriott, director of the National Trust’s rural-heritage program and a Montgomery native.

How it came to be is a story of visionary planning, pragmatic reading of both rural and urban growth, and solid political backing. Described simply, Montgomery County has been skimming off the ability to develop land in its 139-square-mile upper portion and, in one way or another, compensating property owners for the right to do so. Much of that energy to develop has been sent down-county to reinforce urbanization there. At the same time, the county has helped ensure that the protected farmland continues to be used for farming—even as that pursuit undergoes considerable change.

Save Haven

 

Izzak Walton League Farm (John P. Zawitoski)

Montgomery County rises north and west of Washington into the Piedmont along the Potomac River. Its agriculture stretches back to colonial times, when subsistence farming, then tobacco, ruled; wheat, other grains, livestock, and orchards took over in the 19th century. Completion of a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line in 1873 gave ready access to booming postwar Washington, enriching farms and dairies that in turn nourished hamlets like Poolesville, Barnesville, and Damascus. At the height of their productivity in the early 20th century, the farms were generating corn, wheat, and dairy products; after World War II came soybeans. Farmland still blanketed 67 percent of the county in 1949, but urbanization pared that portion down to 49 percent by 1964 and 36 percent by 1978. A wide western-and-northern arc of farmland endured, however.

"This agricultural landscape still reflects the centuries-old pattern of family farms—in field, pasture, and woodlot; in farm houses, farm buildings; and in rural villages and towns," nationally known planner and historian Frederick Gutheim observed in a 1977 report to the Montgomery County Planning Board. Gutheim, an up-county resident who died in 1993, had long talked up this legacy—agricultural as well as environmental and cultural. "While a building evokes its past, the entire agricultural scene describes the larger culture," he wrote, "and the landscape itself is as instructive as a museum, the more so when it is alive with activity." The board had also been worried. Consulting Gutheim and many others, including farmers, real estate interests, developers, and citizens’ groups, it devised a master plan for preserving agriculture and open space. "This was also a time, nationally and in Maryland, when there was a lot of interest in saving farmland," says former planning board chairman Royce Hanson, who piloted the plan to adoption in 1980.

The plan created a 90,000-acre up-county "agricultural reserve" where the residential density was set at one house per 25 acres, down from five acres. This acreage was deemed large enough to support a farm. The plan also offered property owners, faced with shrinking land values caused by the new zoning, compensation through a device known as transferable development rights (TDRs). Farmers in the reserve’s "sending areas" could sell the rights from their land, calculated on the basis of the prior zoning, to developers for use in down-county "receiving areas" where normal residential densities were increased accordingly. It was a less-is-more scheme, costing little public money and offering gain to both sellers and buyers. Farmers could use the money to pay down debt, for example, or buy land and equipment.

Overnight, the ability of landowners to plant houses instead of corn was curtailed. Understandably, many of those most affected—farmers, speculators, real estate brokers—harbored deep reservations about losing equity. "You’ve bought your house, and you hope it’s going to be worth more money when you sell it. That may or may not be the case here," says Allnutt. "It’s still the same problem with preservation programs," says Drew Stabler, a farmer who served on the plan’s agricultural advisory board. "Can you afford to preserve it? How do you keep from taking the equity away from the landowners? It’s not just the farmers." Frank Jamison, president of Charles H. Jamison Real Estate, a Poolesville firm that dominates the up-county market, recalls that "we had gone from half-acre to one-acre to five-acre to 25-acre zoning in a 20-year period. So there was this siege mentality" among some landowners.

Overall, however, the process of selling the plan was "surprisingly nonconfrontational," says Hanson. "There was a lot of skepticism that the system could work," he concedes, but ultimately many farmers and others came on board. "With the chance to recover their equity interest in the land by selling development rights," he says, "I think some of the farmers might say I offered them a deal they couldn’t refuse." Indeed, the county’s carrot-and-stick approach was alluring. And successful. "There are no counties that I’m aware of that have done more" with this approach, says Edward Thompson Jr., senior vice president for public policy of the American Farmland Trust and an up-county resident active in agricultural protection there. The loudest cries came from receiving areas. "There always was resistance to increasing density," says Hanson, citing one overheated case in Potomac, where neighbors contested the use of TDRs at the Avenel Farms project. "The community was not thrilled," he says, "since it meant that they were going to have rich folks’ homes on smaller lots than they might have otherwise had."

A big selling point of the plan was its safeguards of historical and environmental values in the upper county. The planning board was not afraid to admit that it wanted to protect open space as well as agriculture, a goal often derided—particularly by farmers—as saving scenery for city folk. "Were we trying to preserve farming or trying to preserve open space?" says Hanson. "My answer is ‘yes.’ "

"The fact of the matter is that counties tend not to get serious about this until half their land is gone. It’s pretty predictable," says the farmland trust’s Thompson. "Politically, it certainly wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been a very large majority of nonfarmers who wanted to preserve farmland and open space." That reflects a national trend: The areas most threatened by urbanization—populous counties on the edges of the largest metropolitan areas—have scored the greatest gains.

In addition to the agricultural plan, Montgomery County has created a master plan for every one of its communities, acquired parkland along hundreds of miles of streams, channeled development near the Metro subway, revived older commercial centers, and created more affordable housing than any other suburban county in America. "They’ve done it right," says Thompson. "Montgomery basically invented what we now call smart growth."

 

Inverness Farm, Montgomery County (John P. Zawitoski)

Roots of Success

More than 21 years have passed since the county approved the agricultural plan, and it is still going strong. The reserve is intact. The political change of heart that one might have predicted, given the experience of other fast-growing jurisdictions, has not occurred, nor has erosive rezoning. "The longer we have the program, the deeper is the commitment to retain it and the more people who recognize its uniqueness," says Judy Daniel, the planning board’s lead rural planner. "It’s a strong, psychic commitment both up-county and down." The gains are impressive: Prior to the plan, 3,000 acres of farmland were lost yearly; from 1980 to 1998, only 5,500 acres in all were developed. An up-county tour confirms the achievement. "The ag reserve is one of the few places in the metropolitan area where I can drive on quiet roads in a landscape unchanged since my childhood," says the Trust’s Marriott. "I get additional pleasure out of the fact that this is not a threatened landscape I must enjoy before it’s lost."

The ride hasn’t been bump free. Some farmers have complained all along that TDRs fetch too little. (Their market value, initially about $3,500 each, peaked at $11,000 in 1996 and has since declined to approximately $6,500. Partly as a result, few have transferred in recent years.) "They sort of have a point," says Thompson. "You don’t get paid as much for TDRs as your land would have been worth if you’d been able to develop it. But it’s still a good chunk of money." Some farmers claim there aren’t enough receiving areas to stimulate the TDR market, a theory Thompson disputes. The planning board has in any event added receiving areas over the years, working them into new or revised local master plans.

Separate from the TDRs, the county has begun to purchase development rights, since 1987 paying $22 million for 6,268 acres worth of rights. All told, the TDR and purchase ventures, supplemented by similar county and state programs, have protected 53,298 acres of farmland so far—approximately 17 percent of the county’s land area. "This is more acreage and a greater percentage of land than any other local jurisdiction in the country," according to Thompson.

To look at most of Montgomery, you might never guess it harbors so much farmland. It is, after all, a large and prosperous suburb, complete with freeways, shopping centers, condo towers, subdivisions, and even subway lines. But glance also at some of the statistics that the county has gathered: 526 farms and 350 horticultural businesses; 60,510 acres of cropland; 8,000 cows and 15,000 horses; 4,500 acres in sod; 408,000 bushels of wheat and 431,000 of soybeans produced annually; 1.1 million bushels of corn grown for grain. Some suburb.

 

Izzak Walton League Farm's 368 acres are protected by a Rural Legacy easement (John P. Zawitoski)

Montgomery backs up its planners’ vision with practical support for farmers, promoting new farming methods, market opportunities—the county brokered the sale of produce at Giant and Safeway supermarkets—and cooperative arrangements. It also troubleshoots. "You can go over a set of circumstances with them," says Drew Stabler, "and they’ll help you with the programs available and the time frame involved. They really guide you." A landowner wanting to sell TDRs will call Jeremy Criss, manager of the agricultural services division, for help with that process. The division offers small-business loans and, during the drought of the late 1990s, dispensed grants to distressed farmers. The county also operates markets that sell local fruits and vegetables blazoned with "The Pride of Montgomery County" labels. Criss works out of the Agricultural History Farm Park, a 410-acre farm acquired by the county in 1964.

Agriculture in Montgomery County has changed over the last quarter-century. The term "farming" no longer covers it. "While the numbers of farmers, farms, and acres have been going down, the market value of the product sold has been increasing each year the census is done," says Criss. "We’re becoming more efficient but also seeing new types of agriculture." Two sectors have grown enormously —horticulture with its nurseries, landscaping firms, sod farms, and lawn-care companies, and the horse industry with its breeding, training, and recreational operations. Direct sales have also risen, especially at pick-your-own vendors like Homestead Farm. Horticulture, horses, and direct sales thrive on the nearby city. "When agriculture that serves suburban consumers … is included, farming is generating more dollars in the county economy than ever before," reported the county’s 1995 Future of Agriculture Study. Although the trend is away from some types of traditional farming—dairy farms, for example, have all but disappeared—grain farming continues to contribute substantially to the economy and controls a majority of the land.

American Pastoral

The road to Damascus runs high on a ridge near Montgomery’s northern border. No conversion has taken place here, however, other than the building of some houses and a church. Farming still dominates. On a late-summer day, vast stretches of corn and soybeans mature under a hot sun, and just-tilled fields await planting. A traffic sign with a tractor-crossing symbol cautions drivers. This is where Drew Stabler grows corn, wheat, soybeans, hay, and beef cattle at Sunny Ridge Farms. Like the Allnutts, the Stablers have been farming here for generations.

Stabler was one of the farmers who advised the planning board when it drew up its agricultural plan. Although skeptical about losing equity, Stabler concluded that "the program was something we could try to use," which in fact he did, selling 80 percent of his TDRs to a developer in suburban Olney. This was a test case for the board. Using rights from Stabler and others, the developer built 1,200 houses and townhouses. The board had woven receiving areas into the Olney Master Plan, which it drew up alongside the agricultural plan. To negotiate the TDR process, Stabler jokes, "we had to pay for the education of every lawyer in Rockville."

Sunny Ridge Farms has grown in the past 40 years from 200 to 1,500 acres, half of which Stabler leases from owners. He’s made some changes, dropping hogs and sweet corn, for instance, and adding soybeans. But, he wonders, "how far can we go as a farming operation? There’s not a single place to sell grain in Montgomery County anymore. We have to go to Baltimore, the [Maryland] Eastern Shore, or southern Pennsylvania. There are two equipment dealers left in the county, but over 75 percent of their business is in lawn mowers, not ag equipment. And we don’t buy any of our fertilizer, pesticides, and lime here. In the future, if those things get farther away, how long can it be profitable to farm here?"

Diversification may be an answer. Try specialty fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products, some observers say, or go into pick-your-own. Stabler concedes the success of some of these enterprises but says they offer limited markets and don’t save much farmland. Referring to the size of his own operation, he says, "There’s not 1,500 acres of pick-your-own or goat cheese in the county, even with 800,000 people." Edward Thompson of the American Farmland Trust agrees: "The advocates of niche markets—and we’re one of them—tend to talk as if this is the savior of agriculture around cities. Well, if everybody grew bok choy, the market would be glutted." Such a shift would also be expensive, Stabler adds, and "at 65, I’m not quite willing to go that route." But he doesn’t discount the possibility that his younger partners might raise horses, for instance, or organic beef cattle. Traditional farming tends to not attract participants outside the established families. But, Stabler says, "I think there’s still a future for agriculture in this county."

So does Susan Butler, who with her two brothers runs Butler’s Orchard, a pick-your-own enterprise near Germantown that grows fruits, vegetables, bedding plants, pumpkins, and Christmas trees and offers hayrides and Easter-egg hunts. Her father started the business in 1950 with 37 acres of peaches and in the early 1970s rented an adjoining 218-acre farm. By the early 1980s, the kids had finished college and were ready to come back to the farm. "We had been looking at land in [adjacent] Frederick County," Butler says, "thinking we’d move our operation, because the 37 acres wasn’t enough. And it looked like this 218 acres would be developed." Then the rezoning and TDR program came along. The Butlers bought the tract, retaining seven TDRs and leaving the rest with the seller. "The rezoning allowed the price to come down to something we could afford," she says. "We were young and didn’t own any land, so it was a positive.

"Mom and Dad used to wholesale peaches to Washington groceries," Butler continues. But, "after some frosty years, losing a crop, children coming along, Dad got into strawberries. We couldn’t pick enough, so he let people pick. One thing led to another—up to maybe 30 crops." She agrees that there’s a limit to the county’s pick-your-own market but recognizes "we’re in the right niche for an urban area," that of "community-friendly agriculture. … It’s entertainment, recreation, a family activity, a tradition." She sees a future for Butler’s. "We’re still young," she says. "We’re still planting Christmas trees, and that’s another eight years before the crop comes in. You put a blueberry bush in the ground, and you’re thinking it’s going to produce for 30 years. So we plan to continue."

A listing in the Montgomery County Historical Society’s time line—"1999: horses outnumber cows"—is telling. Horses have arrived bigtime. Rarely the raison d’être of a traditional farm, they are now the sole focus of 20,000 acres of "horse farms"—private recreational retreats or businesses that board, train, or breed them for riding, racing, hunting, or show.

One of these equine entrepreneurs is Michael Rubin, who owns Breezy Hill Farm, a 126-acre former dairy farm near the village of Boyds. This is the ideal countryside of the mind’s eye: hilly roads, meandering streams, early-18th-century stone houses, and rolling fields. An international real estate investor in Chevy Chase, Md., Rubin raises a dozen horses on his spread, which he bought three years ago, converting the dairy barn into a stable. "The horses I train and keep for our own use are hunter-jumpers, fox hunters, and for dressage," he says, explaining the latter as "very disciplined and nonspectacular" training for both horse and rider. Rubin also grows hay, for feed and to control stream sedimentation.

Some of the agricultural old guard belittle the horse business as "hobby farming," since it doesn’t produce food and often breaks down so-called real farms into small tracts. But horse owners are "being brought into the agricultural loop," states George Lechlider, chairman of the Montgomery Soil Conservation District, in the 2001 Montgomery County Horse Study. Many traditional farmers—Drew Stabler, for one—now produce hay for the owners of horse operations. "So we have a hay industry today that we didn’t have 25 years ago," says Jeremy Criss.

Still, the trend has "brought a lot of people out there who don’t know how to treat the land," says Thompson. of the farmland trust. Too many horse farmers overgraze pastures, for example, leading to erosion, and improperly dispose of manure, causing stream pollution. "When such problems crop up," says Thompson, "they don’t recognize them. They don’t have country eyes." The Horse Study, writes Lechlider, will "introduce [conservationists] to horse owners." Rubin, whose operation the county deems responsible, works with it to steward his land. "Horses are high-impact animals," he says.

The horse’s growing presence translates into "a stronger constituency for protecting the land," says Thompson. Rubin, in fact, is a major player. In addition to Breezy Hill, he owns 740 adjacent acres, most of it leased to a grain farmer, and he recently acquired 1,700 pristine acres next to Boyds once slated to become a quarry or a landfill. He is permanently protecting all of these holdings from development. Working with the county, the state, and the Trust for Public Land, he is selling more than 2,500 acres—either outright or as development rights and conservation easements. "It will be without question the largest [such preservation undertaking] ever done here," Rubin says, and is also choice for its strategic location at the edge of the reserve.

The Rubin deal is good news for the reserve, which in the eyes of some residents has been threatened ever since the county’s plan went into effect in 1980. "People have no idea how little property the reserve really is," says Jane Hunter. "They try to shoehorn stuff in all the time." Hunter until recently headed the Sugarloaf Citizens Association, founded in 1973 to fight a proposed sewage-treatment plant in the county’s northwest corner. (The plant was not built.) The group has battled a landfill, a power-plant expansion, a composting facility, and a slew of commercial propositions from a golf course to a day spa. Most are allowed only as special exceptions to the zoning code, giving Sugarloaf an opening and time to hone its invective.

"A lot of people think we’re litigious," she says, "and I guess we are." As the result of a 1994 suit against the county over expanding its compost operation, a former dairy barn on county-owned Linden Farm has been renovated and leased to Sugarloaf for its headquarters. An adjacent barn is also being restored. "When this farm is completely restored, it will be the only, and the most extensive, dairy farm in the county that’s intact," says Hunter, a self-described "old-fashioned dirt farmer" who with her husband grows wheat, corn, and soybeans on 2,200 acres near Beallsville.

The newest threat comes from across the Potomac in Virginia, where business and political interests are pushing for construction of Techway, a highway linking the Dulles Airport area with I-270, which shoots northwest through Montgomery. The latest iteration of an outer-beltway proposal that has been hanging around for years, Techway would include the county’s only Potomac bridge beyond the Capital Beltway and thus, its proponents argue, relieve considerable congestion. It almost certainly would slice through the agricultural reserve. Michael Rubin calls it "a bald-assed attempt to kill the ag reserve and ultimately force the development of the land out here by the guys across the river." Although Techway is not without support in Maryland, the county and Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening oppose it, as do many citizens’ groups, including Sugarloaf.

F.A.R.M. (For a Rural Montgomery), a coalition formed in 1994, is hard on the anti-Techway trail. "The road would have a devastating impact on the metro area’s crown jewel of wise planning," says F.A.R.M.’s president, Dolores Milmoe. "Techway would be its death knell—first the road, then the sprawl." A federal study of the issue launched in 2000 by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) was killed by him last May after his own constituents protested Techway’s impact on the Virginia side. Techway will not go away soon, however, since transportation is stalled high on the list of Washington-area vexations. In 2000, F.A.R.M. helped birth a new regional alliance, Solutions Not Sprawl, to fight Techway and promote such alternatives as a new Metro subway line, light-rail service, and balanced land use. "The river crossing/highway scenario is still going forward," the group warns. A Montgomery County transportation task force—"heavily weighted with road-oriented members," Milmoe says—has in fact come out in favor of the project.

Meanwhile, Loudoun County in Virginia has launched its own bold attempt to save farmland. Defenders of Montgomery’s reserve like to point out its stark contrast with ever-thickening development directly across the Potomac. Loudoun is one of the nation’s fastest-growing counties. In July, it imposed strict growth controls over its still-rural western flank, part of which it rezoned to allow only one house per 50 acres. But, unlike Maryland, which abets and funds county farmland protection, Virginia is rigidly conservative about governmental controls over land and doles out little independence to its counties. "The divide along the Potomac is incredibly radical in terms of what government can and cannot do," says Montgomery planner Judy Daniel. Opponents of the Loudoun initiative are readying scores of lawsuits. "It’s going to take an extraordinary defense and act of will to maintain what they want to do there," says Thompson. "But Loudoun has done pretty much what Montgomery did 20-plus years ago, and it may not be too late."

Can Montgomery’s achievement be duplicated? Similar urban-fringe counties—certain others in Maryland, for example, Marin in California, and Lancaster in Pennsylvania—have scored success with comparable carrot-and-stick mixes. Many others are trying hard to save critical masses of farmland. "The biggest problem with farmland protection in this country," says Thompson, "is that communities are not drawing a line in the sand and saying we’re not going to develop beyond this point." The solution remains simple: Think big, act big.

—Arnold Berke is senior editor at Preservation.

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