Bill filed with aim of ensuring affordable APR land

The Agricultural Preservation Restriction Program completed its most recent fiscal year with customary success, having spent $6.8 million in FY2000 to protect 3,597 acres across the state.

These successes, however, are shadowed by an ongoing threat to the program and its future benefits to farmers: the booming real estate market.

"In parts of Massachusetts, an estate market now exists where the highest resale value of APR protected land is no longer its agricultural value," says Representative Steven Kulik (D-Worthington).

"There is now a class of real estate buyers, many of whom have little or no interest in agriculture, who are willing to pay significantly above the agricultural value for an APR farm for the opportunity of living on a beautiful, pastoral property surrounded by protected open space."

The estate buyer can't build on APR land, but he can effectively turn it into a big backyard. Farmers can't afford bidding wars with millionaires, with the result that productive soils that were once farmed intensively are being turned into mere pieces in an estate owner's landscape design.

The problem most often arises on an APR farm in which the original contract allowed for a new house, or covered an existing house. The APR farmowner can sell the house site and surrounding protected farmland for many multiples of its ag value.

Since 1992, APR contracts have included an option allowing the state or its assignee to buy the farmland at its agricultural value. These more recent APRs have also excluded houses and potential house sites from the APR. Combined, these provisions effectively ensure that farmers won't be priced out of the market for APR land.

In an effort to meet landowners' needs while keeping APR land affordable, Kulik has filed a bill (H.3158) that would allow the state to release a house lot from an APR if the landowner agrees to execute an updated APR that prohibits any other future dwellings and gives the state the option to buy the land at its agricultural value.

The bill is a compromise, which seeks to maintain the affordability of the land to farmers while giving APR landowners the house lot they want. It is the fate of any compromise to be knocked by hard-liners, but the bill offers a way to ensure that the millions of dollars the state has invested in APR farms will continue to benefit Massachusetts farmers and taxpayers. The bill deserves swift passage.

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