Preserving Family Farms
Scenic Hudson Ups the Ante on Farmland Conservation
by Philip Ehrensaft
The “foodshed”—both as an idea and a hi-tech mapping tool—is increasingly important for farm
by Philip Ehrensaft
The “foodshed”—both as an idea and a hi-tech mapping tool—is increasingly important for farm
sector and local economic
development policy advocates. Scenic Hudson upped the farmland conservation
ante during the 1990s by moving beyond ad hoc efforts to save a given farm,
focusing instead on conserving high-value farmland clusters in key agricultural
towns. Now Scenic Hudson is upping the ante again, via a regional foodshed
strategy firmly grounded in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) research.
That foodshed strategy is spelled out in their newly published “Securing
Fresh Local Food for New York City and the Hudson Valley” (downloadable at:
scenichudson.org/sites/default/files/Foodshed_Conservation_Plan.final_.web_.pdf).
A foodshed is almost like a hydrologist’s
watershed. The Hudson River watershed is an extensive drainage basin defined by
landscape elevations and tributary waterways that feed the great river. While
nothing is permanent in nature, the geological timescale for watersheds is
measured in hundreds of millennia. Scientific advances fine-tune measuring
watershed boundaries and flows, and how these flows are impacted by human
artifacts like the impermeable surfaces of parking lots. But watershed
boundaries themselves are literally set in stone.
Foodsheds are different. The concept was
invented in 1929 by the chief of the Port of New York Authority's commerce
division, Walter P. Hedden, in his book How Great Cities Are Fed.
Hedden's foodshed concept was an explicitly imperfect analogy between mapping
watersheds and mapping local, national and international flows of food supplies
into a huge urban market: “The barriers which deflect raindrops into one river basin
rather than into another are natural land elevations, while the barriers which
guide and control movements of foodstuffs are more often economic than
physical.”
More recent guises of the foodshed concept
shifts the focus from describing existing food flows towards restructuring
those flows in favor of local farmland sources. Locally produced food is
fresher and more nutritious than typical fare supplied by trans-continental
hauls from regions like California's Salinas Valley; cuts down carbon
generation and energy costs for transporting food; and can potentially recycle
urban food waste back into farming zones.
What “local” means for a specific foodshed
project is tied to proponents' framing of what kind of farming is or is not
ecologically, economically, and politically sustainable. That framing's
viability is, in turn, coupled to GIS technologies that evaluate agricultural
land quality, parcel by parcel, within the defined foodshed.
On that count, Scenic Hudson's new effort is a
model of foodshed analysis and policy advocacy. Their foodshed project is
spearheaded by Steve Rosenberg,
director of the Scenic Hudson Land
Trust. Rosenberg is a real estate lawyer who left his Washington DC
practice to work on Hudson Valley land conservation issues. Conservation issues
grabbed Rosenberg while he grew up in Southern Florida, watching the
despoliation of paradise so sharply depicted in Carl Hiassen's ecological
mystery novels.
Rosenberg and his team define the Valley's
foodshed as a 150-mile long chain of counties on both sides of the Hudson
River. The chain stretches from Westchester and Rockland in the south, up to
Albany and Rensselaer. Although Sullivan lies mostly outside the Hudson River
watershed, it's included, because of Sullivan's coupling into the Mid-Hudson
regional economy.
From an agricultural ecology perspective,
limiting the Big Apple-centered foodshed to the Hudson Valley is overly
restrictive. Applying a 150-mile transportation radius in all directions
incorporates farmland stretching into New Jersey, Connecticut, and the
northeastern corner of Maryland.
Politically, however, the restricted
geographical scope is logical: farm policy is channeled via lobbying in state
legislatures, and state delegations in Washington. Multi-state lobbying flies
in wide territories with similar agriculture, like the Corn Belt or the Great
Plains. Our agriculture, just within the 150-mile NYC to Albany corridor, is
fragmented and variegated. That makes farm lobbying a challenge.
Countering that fragmentation are: 1) the
NYC-Albany corridor contains significant farmland parcels suitable for the high
value horticultural and niche livestock products increasingly demanded within
the Valley itself as well as the Big Apple; 2) we're regaining the Valley's
strong pre-1945 regional identity that was shaken-up by the post-1945
highways-industrial complex.
Once foodshed boundaries were defined, the
next call was the intensive, expensive GIS analysis necessary for turning a
promising idea into an operational tool. Scenic Hudson inventoried the quantity
and quality of just about every acre of suitable Valley cropland.
Then came the really hard part: even a
coalition of senior, well-endowed nonprofit organizations like Scenic Hudson,
plus senior government agencies, don't have nearly enough resources to save all
the farmland that merits saving. There has to be system of prioritization.
A first priority was restricting conservation
efforts to farms of 45+ acres because: 1) these farms supply the lion's share of
the Valley's's agricultural production; 2) greater financial and technical
resources are needed to save larger farms than community efforts like farmers
markets that help smaller farms survive; and 3) it's more expensive per acre to
conserve small farms, so scarce resources are best leveraged by targeting
larger parcels.
So 5,387 farms of 45+ acres, comprising
730,389 acres of significant cropland, receive priority. To date, only 11
percent of these farms, occupying 81,430 acres, have been conserved.
Priority number two is choosing which of the
remaining 89 percent of the unprotected 45+ acre farms should be conserved.
Regional clustering of farms with high quality soils comes into play here.
So Scenic Hudson identified regional clusters
of Valley farms via three demanding steps. First, they used USDA soil quality
standards to establish the productive capacity of each of the region's 5,387
45+ acre farms. Second, they measured the extent to which relatively large
numbers of farms with high quality soils cluster within a given town. Third,
they calculated the extent to which these high agricultural value towns, in
turn, clustered into a regional concentration of high value agricultural towns.
Nine clusters of high-value
farming towns were identified via this intensive data mining. These clusters
include 614 of the Valley's 815 highest priority farms. Scenic Hudson proposes that
stage one of new conservation efforts concentrates on these nine clusters. An
estimated $720 million is required to conserve the 163,673 acres worked by
these 614 farms.
Now comes the hardest part of all: mobilizing
the public and private agencies that have the dollars and expertise to make
this conservation happen. Scenic Hudson gives us a Cook's Tour of the pluses
and minuses of existing farmland conservation programs and policies, both
public and private.
Some parts of that tour are downright
depressing: like the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets not
issuing a single request for new applications to its Farmland Protection
Program since 2008 because the
agency's still working on a backlog of applications. But mostly it's a story of
dispersed and uncoordinated measures that need to be pulled together, both in
terms of strategy and political support.
One potential game changer that's central to
Scenic Hudson's efforts is getting private and public New York City interests
to hone in on Hudson Valley farms as the logical priority source of fresh,
healthy foods. Another game changer is reversing the lack of support from major
private foundations for conserving the Valley's farmland. Scenic Hudson's
exemplary research speaks a language that major foundations can understand.
But it's less sure this language translates
readily to grassroots organizations that are also necessary for carrying Scenic
Hudson's farmland conservation strategies forward. As a researcher on farm
structure, I'm mightily impressed by Scenic Hudson's intensive work and the
logic of their strategy. But, wearing another grassroots organizer hat, I see
unanswered questions about firing up citizens' movements, which trend towards
highly locavore perspectives, in support of Scenic Hudson's proposals. Ditto
for farm interests not located in one of the nine strategic clusters.
Minus rumblings from below, and a buy-in from
farmers in general, there's less chance that senior governments and foundations
will put their resources behind Scenic Hudson's well-founded proposals. And the
Hudson Valley will be a better place if Scenic Hudson's proposals are indeed carried
out.
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 6:11 PM.
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