Officials concerned over disappearing farmlands

BY BILLY BRUCE
The Valdosta Daily Times

August 11, 2007 12:14 am

— VALDOSTA — Travel the country highways of South Georgia — from Lake Park, Lakeland, Quitman, Hahira, Adel, Valdosta, Ray City and Nashville and all stops in between — and it’s obvious that people are moving into the region in droves.
The common sight of single-family home subdivisions rising from the dust of former row crop fields of cotton, corn, peanuts and other vegetables is raising some concerns among regional agricultural officials.
At the pace of current development, agriculture agents from Lowndes, Brooks, Lanier and Clinch counties are questioning the implications for South Georgia farmers.
“I have been here since 1999, and every year we have lost good productive farmland to residential subdivisions,” Lowndes County Extension Coordinator Mickey Fourakers said. “Constantly we’re hearing of development for new subdivisions that would take out good productive land, from Lake Park to Hahira.”
The South Georgia Regional Development Center (SGRDC) reports that of 2,834 new residential properties built in Lowndes since 2000, at least 392 were built on land zoned for agricultural use, said Rachel Boulay-Strom, project manager for Valdosta Lowndes Regional Geographic Information Systems (VALOR) at the SGRDC.
In Lanier, Clinch and Brooks counties, the report is similar.
About 1,000 acres of quality farm land has been sold to residential developers in the last three or four years in Lanier County, said Elvin Andrews, extension coordinator for Clinch and Lanier counties. “We are losing some of our best farm lands.”
Some of the Lanier farmlands were family estates where the grandfather or father had passed on and family members not in the farming business sold the land.
“In Lanier, they’ll take a 100 acre field and sell it, then the developer divides it up into subdivisions,” Andrews said. “Speculators are buying the land at prices far above the existing agricultural market value, which drives up the value of surrounding lands as well.”
What the buyer is willing to pay the seller goes right back to the county tax office where taxable property values are set according to sales activity, Andrews said.
“On one farm, they picked out a field here and another there, and paid $6,500 to $7,000 an acre,” Andrews said. “That drives up land prices. I’ve seen a lot of this happening in the past two years.”
“We’ve got a lot of military career people who are from here who are retiring and moving back to Lanier to retire, and we’ve got a lot of people who worked at Moody AFB and are retiring and settling here,” Andrews said. “The homes that have been built are selling because the people are coming.”
In Clinch, timber farmers are divesting themselves of land, selling small parcels to would-be developers and keeping the rest for timber. But so far, most of the former timber land hasn’t been developed, Andrews said.
In Brooks County, Extension Coordinator Johnny Whiddon said he’s alarmed by the public’s seeming aloofness to the positive impact of agriculture on South Georgia.
“I just hope South Georgia doesn’t get to the point where we don’t have enough land to support ourselves,” Whiddon said. “We can’t put everything in houses and shopping malls. We need to find a balance between rural and urban. Valdosta is a very nice community. Part of the reason is because it is surrounded by rural land. We have a good blend. A lot of people don’t see that.”
Whiddon urged regional discussions on the issues.
“The people of South Georgia need to get together and decide what we want to be like in 20 years or 50 years,” Whiddon said. “You have to go a long way to find the quality of life we have here. I’ve been as far north as Minnesota and as far west as California. I don’t know of any other place I’d rather live. If there weren’t more positives than there are negatives in South Georgia, why is everyone moving here and trying to build it up?”

It’s the economy, too
Agriculture generates an estimated $560 million annually into the South Georgia economy, according to Southeast Agriculture Coalition Inc. Executive Director Jerome Tucker.
For every dollar a farmer spends to produce crops, three more dollars are generated in the community, Fourakers said.
“It has a tremendous impact. I don’t believe the average consumer understands the value of the agriculture infrastructure,” Fourakers said. “We are so used to going to Publix or Wal-Mart to get our stuff that we have lost the connection as to where our food comes from. The serious thing about it is, once our farmers go out of production, they won’t go back in. It’s not like manufacturing where you just sort of turn the factory back on. It takes a year or more to get back into the planting cycle, and it’s pretty expensive to do. Once it is broken, we can’t go back into it overnight. We need to protect our agriculture infrastructure.”
Fourakers said he knows many Lowndes farmers who were forced to buy land surrounding their farms to prevent developers from buying it.
Andrews noted that developers buy uplands with the best soils for growing crops. “They don’t go look for the worst land in swamps or wetlands,” he said. “They’re buying up top quality land for farming.”
Andrews also noted that county taxes in rural counties will rise with residential development because rural infrastructure is much cheaper to maintain and support.
“You’ll need paved roads and road maintenance money, police and fire protection, and other infrastructure support that is more expensive in urban areas,” he said.
Those higher taxes combined with the recent struggles of farmers hit by the Easter freeze, drought and wildfires has caused a lot of farmers to sell their land just to break even and survive, Whiddon said.
“And when they sell their farm land, they try to get the most money they can. And that means selling it to developers at top dollar,” Whiddon said.
Also, as more farms are sold off to developers, the United States has to import more food from abroad, where standards for pesticides, insecticides and other protections are much more lax than in the United States, Fourakers said. “We’re all reading about China right now,” he noted.
“We’ve all gone through the oil shortage,” he said. “You go to the grocery store with money in your pocket to buy food, but there is no food on the shelves to buy. Think about that.”

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