Some members of New York City Council want to allocate $50 million from the city budget to pay farmers to keep farming in Hudson Valley, reports The New York Times.
As Hudson Valley farmland has grown more lucrative, spurring a wave of residential and commercial development, the idea is to prevent family farms from selling to the highest bidder—and protect the booming market for local produce, both in the valley and at the farmers markets and restaurants in the city. The number of state farms has declined from 38,264 in 1997 to 35,537 in 2012. Since 1982 nearly half a million acres have been lost to development projects, according to the American Farmland Trust. According to a USDA estimate, there was 7.2 million acres of land in farms in New York State in 2015.
“The risk to farmland is a risk to healthy food for New York City residents,” Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick, Democrat of Manhattan, said. Many farmers markets are in neighborhoods that have few stores, Garodnick told the Times. The number of farmers markets rose to 146 in 2015 from 79 in 2006, and city dwellers and commuters have come to rely on those stands for locally-grown food.
What Garodnick proposes is a “conservation easement program that would pay farmers the development value of their land and impose a deed restriction to permanently protect their land from development. Some farmers might use the money to make improvements, while others could lease or sell their land to other farmers,” said the Times.
Council members have until June 30, when the city’s budget will be finalized, to get their preservation plan adopted. A spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said the mayor was reviewing Garodnick’s plan.