Excerpt
IT is impossible, these late-summer days, not to resort to the imagery of baseball in considering why it is that the effort to establish a federal policy—even a modest one—of keeping our best farmland from being paved over has scarcely gotten to first base. In fact, the Farmland Protection Policy Act (and the term “modest,” when applied to FPPA, may be an overstatement), though the law of the land since 1981, has yet to be implemented and only after the most extreme political machinations managed to stay alive at all.
“Strike one!”
Ten years ago conservationists began to agitate for federal policy to protect farmland from development. It was then becoming clear that buckshot urbanization—bringing with it the costly (to municipal governments) and disruptive (to farming) uglifications of suburban sprawl—could puncture fragile agricultural economies, not only on the fringes of cities, but in purely rural regions as well. In 1974 a series of background papers was prepared for a “Seminar on the Retention of Prime Lands,” held in 1975 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture-the first official recognition that the cropland base might actually be a …
Footnotes
Charles E. Little, 3929 Washington Street, Kensington, Maryland 20895, writes about land use and environmental issues. His commentary on the defeat of the original Agricultural Land Protection Act appeared in the March-April 1980 issue of the JSWC.
- Copyright 1984 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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