One of the things most of us enjoy about Harford County is being able to drive past a farm seeing the tops of the corn stalks waving in the breeze, or watching animals grazing, especially when the young horses are running through the fields in the spring. But the fact is that farming is a way of life that is under siege here in Harford County. The increasing numbers of non-farm neighbors interfere with some of the things a farmer needs to do to keep those fields in agriculture. For example, the equipment for harvesting field crops such as corn, soybeans and hay is large and expensive, and must be moved from field to field over local roads. The farmer has little choice about when to move his equipment because the time of harvest is dictated by weather, including the amount of moisture in the air and in the crop, and those vary by the time of day. Residential development in rural areas increases the amount of non-farm traffic on local roads and makes it more difficult for farmers to move their equipment when they must. Complaints about smells and noise from new homeowners, or their youngsters riding four-wheelers through planted cropfields make farming extremely difficult and sometimes impossible.
For years now, official Harford County policy has been to discourage residential construction in the areas outside the county’s “development envelope”. The 1993 Rural Plan, for instance, set as a prime goal to “direct development away from the prime agricultural areas of the County.” That plan proposed creation of a transfer of development rights (TDR) program to shift development rights “from a designated agricultural area to another location where agriculture is not the primary land use or where the Master Plan proposes growth to take place.” For both political and technical reasons, such a TDR program has never been created in Harford County.
The Master Plan update being prepared by the County administration replaces the 1993 Rural Plan, and in the process drops the goal of reducing the number of development rights in prime agricultural areas of the County. Many farm leaders want to keep the goal, and are looking for other ways to attain it. Perhaps it is time for the Master Plan to define the prime agricultural areas. We have the development envelope where housing construction is paramount, why not similar areas or zones where agriculture comes first? Instead of a TDR program to move building rights out of the prime agricultural area, maybe a retargeted program for purchase and extinguishment of development rights is the best approach. Additional funding would make that approach even more effective.
The one sure thing is that if we do nothing, Harford County will become a large suburb, fully built out like Howard County, and we will no longer have the benefit of those beautiful rural views. The economic, food producing, quality-of-life benefits of our agricultural industry will no longer be part of Harford County’s heritage.