I just have to say, going out of your way to acknowledge Freddie de Boer, of all people, calling you out for intemperate remarks is an act of tremendous humility and intellectual honesty.
At a planning workshop last month I pushed back against exactly this. Some are trying to get farmland conservation into our plan of conservation and development and I had a list of a few bigger downtown and suburban neighborhoods that had been old farms. Which was quite easy because everything in New England was farms once! We have absurd situations where the descendants of the last farmers are desperately trying to sell off or develop the land they've inherited and it's the neighbors organizing relentlessly to force them into endless intland wetland hearings and filing lawsuits even when things finally get approved.
What's nice is at public comment you have to state name and address, so it's pretty easy to check what farm their property had been prior to development. It's totally OK that MY house was built on an old farm but HOW DARE YOU try to sell that farm to EVIL developers????
Which is funny because all those new england farmers went west towards industrialized midwest cities the instant the Erie canal became viable (my family included). Poor farming practices, multiple wars, and subsistence living is what ended the new england agrarian lifestyle. Those peoples own ancestors would look at them with confusion.
New England is terrible for farming! Short grow season, rocky soil, too much sand and clay. The only thing that can be reasonably successful here is dairy.
I always recall that Maine led the nation in the production of potatoes, a common one for less than ideal soils, until irrigation in the inland Northwest just took off and dominated it after World War II.
One of the cool things I learned taking a class about trees as a senior is the history of land use changes in New England. Even before Europeans came to this part of America the environment was relatively “new” because the glaciers had only pulled back tens of thousands of years ago. Then the Native Americans changed the environment a lot by wiping out a lot of Pleistocene megafauna and doing a lot of active management of the forests. Then the Europeans cleared all of the old growth forest in New England to make room for farms and for lumber. Then after the Civil War farming moved out west and the forests came back, except it was all conifers because they do better in open spaces than deciduous trees. It’s been long enough that we have a bunch of deciduous trees in New England forests again, but they’re totally different types because of Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight. So a lot has been changing.
As someone who is a major donor to my local land trust (Sycamore Land Trust in southern Indiana, lots of great places to hike if you're here), I have several thoughts.
1. Farms are obviously not nature, but equally obviously different kinds of development have different relationships with nature. Traveling wild animals, be they antelopes or songbirds, will find it easier to move through a farm than a housing development. The additional roads and other pavement of a development are also problematic in many ways. And so on. This is even more true of western ranch land, which has often never even been plowed.
2. Obviously conservation easements can be abused, and this should not be permitted. Trump has some on a golf course in New Jersey, for example.
3. It's often possible, as the example Matt described makes clear, to go from a farm to a more natural use. Most parkland in New England and even beyond, even in the mountains, is actually like that. Once it becomes a housing development that's much harder. For example, Sycamore Land Trust has been combining old farmland into a large protected area here, which would be basically impossible if it had turned into subdivisions.
4. As Freddie points out, there's genuinely a tension between what people want in Maine (a house on the coast with some land) and actually fitting in more people. That's not the case everywhere and the London green belt is destructive in a way that conservation easements in Blue Hill are not.
One other important thing to mention is that, especially in the Maine context, farm is a rather broad term. In large parts of northern Maine, the land is, in some sense, farms, but is in fact managed for timber production. This is what most people think of as undeveloped forests. However, many of the timber companies have recently been selling some of that land for housing developments, particularly for large vacation homes for extremely wealthy people. Conservation easements there imply an extremely big difference between possible uses in a way that going from a cornfield to a suburb does not necessarily
It’s interesting that vertical farms play a relatively prominent role in abundance discourse. I am not the world’s expert on this but I did write a book on green roof design, installation, and maintenance so I know something about growing plants in unusual conditions (and when I was researching it I met some vertical farming experts).
As I understand it, VF is only workable for certain crops like lettuces. And because plants are not growing in traditional soil, a lot of nutrient inputs are required, and runoff from such operations needs to be managed to reflect that.
Maybe these problems have been solved and we’re on the verge of a VF revolution. If not, though, the implied reliance on VF as a weird trick to enable land use reform/housing abundance makes me more skeptical.
(Also I thought Matt was squarely against buying overpriced produce at farmers’ markets…)
Yeah, Matt does always strike me as overly optimistic with vertical farming.
And as for your parenthetical, I'll gladly take on that mantle if Matt won't. I hope someone has done a Pepsi Challenge equivalent with farmer's market food before.
It does seem to have a very niche use case. VC money subsidized a few of these start-ups and they still failed. I still don’t understand why it atttacts VC money considering they usually avoid industries as capital intensive as farming.
While the farm is an iconic image of America for many, it is definitely not nature and does not reflect the natural historical state of the land. In the UK, much of the population or visitors believe the image of the sheep farm with its open fields and stone walls as a state of the countryside that has existed for hundreds of years. This is a complete myth and really goes back only about 150 to 200 years. There is now the growing movement of rewilding, which is much further progressed in the UK than the US. You will find pockets of it scattered throughout the US, but it is pursued more broadly in the UK. It highlights what exactly true nature around farming land looked like before it became an integral part of the human landscape. There's a great book called Wilding that talks about what happens when a farm in the UK is returned to a true natural state and both the ecological and economic benefits that can be derived from that. It's a concept that I've thought about that I believe should be more actively pursued in various parts of the US.
We have some non-profit farms here in Vermont like Shelburne Farms that make a great tourist destination, rec area for locals, educational resource, makes tasty cheese, conservative work.
I really like this take. For me, the key with conservation easements is that they're usually agreements between private parties. I'm a strong believer that private parties should be allowed to enter into mutually beneficial contracts if they want to. If a bunch of private donors feel that farms are natural and beautiful and they want to pay money to a landowner to preserve a farm, I don't see any valid reason to interfere with that private transaction.
As Matt points out, "tax break" isn't special treatment for these easements. It's just a recognition that the private contract signed by the parties (the easement) has reduced the value of the land and that means it gets taxed less.
I think this is a challenging problem because in general I think markets are a very good at allocating resources for land and I’m sure the state of Kansas wouldn’t turn into Hong Kong but for regulations. But wilderness really is something that markets place no value on.
I don’t really want to see all wildlife contained to what few national parks we can make a case that they have transcendent beauty alone. Seeing nature reduced to a sort of park zoo in a tiny proportion of the earth we’ve set aside feels like a tragic loss.
There's a lot of land here out West that's never going to be suitable for almost all kinds of development, and thus it becomes suitable for national forests or range land or what have you.
People want to believe that farmers are proud custodians of the land who pat their animals on the head before running their hands through stalks of wheat in a field like Russell Crowe in Gladiator. People like the idea of 'naturalness', which is where the fixation against so called ultraprocessed food comes from. Of course, real farming should be as industrial as the manufacture of microchips. The ideal should be something like the farm at the start of Blade Runner 2049 - abundant food, efficiently grown.
You see this pattern everywhere - a popular conception rooted in a romantic past that probably didn't even exist, even as technology has lowered prices, increased output, and made the entire endeavor safer and more productive.
People love artisans, but if you want a pacemaker or airplane turbine, you want something manufactured with tolerances measured in microns. Nobody says: "I wish my MRI machine had been handcrafted."
The other point that I'm surprised Matt didn't point out is that if a community is going to have urban growth boundaries of any kind, be it for actual wilderness or cutesy farms or artificially constructed outdoor recreation or whatever, it needs to be even *more* allowing than typical of all kinds of building within the UGB. But that often isn't allowed either! It sounds like that's a big problem in the UK. And small resort towns in the US are also underratedly terrible for this, UGB or not. Protecting wilderness in those places makes a lot of sense, but given that, the remaining deleveloped land needs to be much denser for people to live in and have jobs in.
I like that Matt is reminding us here that farms aren't an inherently natural or even good use of any specific parcel of land. It's all contingent in the end. In addition to the housing fights, we're also seeing this distorted "farms are the most natural land use" argument deployed in fights to block energy infrastructure.
Many rural areas are going through battles where local farmers and other landowners try to block energy projects like utility scale solar, wind, and transmission projects. The true reason for these fights is usually that the farmers and other landowners don't want to their views spoiled. But rather than offering to buy the views they don't own, they deploy this fake "farms are the most natural and best land use" argument instead.
The irony is that many of these small boutique farmers are running fairly inefficient and wasteful operations because they don't have the scale needed to farm economically and efficiently. So they spew excess fertilizer and pesticides and waste tons of water. Meanwhile, the energy projects they oppose, aside from changing view sheds, barely have any true impact on the environment at all. That is, aside from reducing the amount of pollution in the air.
Are conservation easements actually permanent though? If it’s true that they reduce the value of the property, that would seem to create a loophole for the Fifth Amendment. A government could just remove the easement, offer $0 in “just compensation”, and still come out ahead.
I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that these easements don't actually destroy any value. There are two things of value, the land and the land's development rights. The easement separates these two value components and leaves one with the landowner and the other with the trust that holds and manages the easement. The development rights "value" is still there, it's just held in a trust that is operated with rules that keep the value "locked up" perpetually.
So I think theoretically, if the state wanted to take the land through eminent domain, they'd have to pay the landowner for the reduced value land and also pay the trust for the development rights that are locked up.
One thing I think some of the anti-British yimby discourse overlooks is maybe rather than Britain being weird, the issue is that as the first country to industrialise, Britain was merely the first to exhibit nimby pathologies that come for all countries as suburbs form, affluence rises and cities lack natural places to expand. I do think a big offer on saying, "we're going to massively cut back on the green belt but what green spaces we leave, will be much more focused on creating genuine green space that people can enjoy" might be the way to solve the issue. But it would be expensive.
On farming, an overlooked issue is that encouraging smallholding farms, makes for inefficient farms because they lack the size or capital required to make intensive methods practical or financial rewarding. Its one of the reasons our farms (which are smaller than European ones let alone American farms) produce food that is so much more expensive. Clarkson's Farm on Amazon Prime has explored this a lot.
Smallholding farms also operate under more cost pressure (no economies of scale) which leads structurally to be needing to push the land more intensively - which pushes towards soil exhaustion (and/or intensive use of inputs to offset soil exhaustion).
As someone who loves both nature and dense urban areas, wouldn't supporting urban greenbelts and conservation easements be a sort of double or nothing strategy to force development through density/upzoning, rather than perpetual sprawl (which I personally hate both aesthetically and also for its environmental impacts)?
I just have to say, going out of your way to acknowledge Freddie de Boer, of all people, calling you out for intemperate remarks is an act of tremendous humility and intellectual honesty.
Fucking lol
At a planning workshop last month I pushed back against exactly this. Some are trying to get farmland conservation into our plan of conservation and development and I had a list of a few bigger downtown and suburban neighborhoods that had been old farms. Which was quite easy because everything in New England was farms once! We have absurd situations where the descendants of the last farmers are desperately trying to sell off or develop the land they've inherited and it's the neighbors organizing relentlessly to force them into endless intland wetland hearings and filing lawsuits even when things finally get approved.
What's nice is at public comment you have to state name and address, so it's pretty easy to check what farm their property had been prior to development. It's totally OK that MY house was built on an old farm but HOW DARE YOU try to sell that farm to EVIL developers????
Which is funny because all those new england farmers went west towards industrialized midwest cities the instant the Erie canal became viable (my family included). Poor farming practices, multiple wars, and subsistence living is what ended the new england agrarian lifestyle. Those peoples own ancestors would look at them with confusion.
New England is terrible for farming! Short grow season, rocky soil, too much sand and clay. The only thing that can be reasonably successful here is dairy.
I always recall that Maine led the nation in the production of potatoes, a common one for less than ideal soils, until irrigation in the inland Northwest just took off and dominated it after World War II.
They even teach kids in elementary school in New England that the rocky local soils were bad for farming.
One of the cool things I learned taking a class about trees as a senior is the history of land use changes in New England. Even before Europeans came to this part of America the environment was relatively “new” because the glaciers had only pulled back tens of thousands of years ago. Then the Native Americans changed the environment a lot by wiping out a lot of Pleistocene megafauna and doing a lot of active management of the forests. Then the Europeans cleared all of the old growth forest in New England to make room for farms and for lumber. Then after the Civil War farming moved out west and the forests came back, except it was all conifers because they do better in open spaces than deciduous trees. It’s been long enough that we have a bunch of deciduous trees in New England forests again, but they’re totally different types because of Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight. So a lot has been changing.
As someone who is a major donor to my local land trust (Sycamore Land Trust in southern Indiana, lots of great places to hike if you're here), I have several thoughts.
1. Farms are obviously not nature, but equally obviously different kinds of development have different relationships with nature. Traveling wild animals, be they antelopes or songbirds, will find it easier to move through a farm than a housing development. The additional roads and other pavement of a development are also problematic in many ways. And so on. This is even more true of western ranch land, which has often never even been plowed.
2. Obviously conservation easements can be abused, and this should not be permitted. Trump has some on a golf course in New Jersey, for example.
3. It's often possible, as the example Matt described makes clear, to go from a farm to a more natural use. Most parkland in New England and even beyond, even in the mountains, is actually like that. Once it becomes a housing development that's much harder. For example, Sycamore Land Trust has been combining old farmland into a large protected area here, which would be basically impossible if it had turned into subdivisions.
4. As Freddie points out, there's genuinely a tension between what people want in Maine (a house on the coast with some land) and actually fitting in more people. That's not the case everywhere and the London green belt is destructive in a way that conservation easements in Blue Hill are not.
I was waiting for Trump’s to come up. Especially since they’re so obviously fraudulent.
One other important thing to mention is that, especially in the Maine context, farm is a rather broad term. In large parts of northern Maine, the land is, in some sense, farms, but is in fact managed for timber production. This is what most people think of as undeveloped forests. However, many of the timber companies have recently been selling some of that land for housing developments, particularly for large vacation homes for extremely wealthy people. Conservation easements there imply an extremely big difference between possible uses in a way that going from a cornfield to a suburb does not necessarily
It’s interesting that vertical farms play a relatively prominent role in abundance discourse. I am not the world’s expert on this but I did write a book on green roof design, installation, and maintenance so I know something about growing plants in unusual conditions (and when I was researching it I met some vertical farming experts).
As I understand it, VF is only workable for certain crops like lettuces. And because plants are not growing in traditional soil, a lot of nutrient inputs are required, and runoff from such operations needs to be managed to reflect that.
Maybe these problems have been solved and we’re on the verge of a VF revolution. If not, though, the implied reliance on VF as a weird trick to enable land use reform/housing abundance makes me more skeptical.
(Also I thought Matt was squarely against buying overpriced produce at farmers’ markets…)
Yeah, Matt does always strike me as overly optimistic with vertical farming.
And as for your parenthetical, I'll gladly take on that mantle if Matt won't. I hope someone has done a Pepsi Challenge equivalent with farmer's market food before.
It does seem to have a very niche use case. VC money subsidized a few of these start-ups and they still failed. I still don’t understand why it atttacts VC money considering they usually avoid industries as capital intensive as farming.
Vertical farms in Abundance Movement??
I don't recall ever seeing that, although this may be my reading biais.
It's generally a nonsensical idea and wrong-headed
Maine currently has that strange condition of being a place a lot of people want to move to because there aren't a lot of people there.
Inverse Yogi Berra problem.
While the farm is an iconic image of America for many, it is definitely not nature and does not reflect the natural historical state of the land. In the UK, much of the population or visitors believe the image of the sheep farm with its open fields and stone walls as a state of the countryside that has existed for hundreds of years. This is a complete myth and really goes back only about 150 to 200 years. There is now the growing movement of rewilding, which is much further progressed in the UK than the US. You will find pockets of it scattered throughout the US, but it is pursued more broadly in the UK. It highlights what exactly true nature around farming land looked like before it became an integral part of the human landscape. There's a great book called Wilding that talks about what happens when a farm in the UK is returned to a true natural state and both the ecological and economic benefits that can be derived from that. It's a concept that I've thought about that I believe should be more actively pursued in various parts of the US.
There’s an interesting chapter (/chapters) on rewilding in Kim Stanley Robinsons great book Ministry for the Future.
We have some non-profit farms here in Vermont like Shelburne Farms that make a great tourist destination, rec area for locals, educational resource, makes tasty cheese, conservative work.
I really like this take. For me, the key with conservation easements is that they're usually agreements between private parties. I'm a strong believer that private parties should be allowed to enter into mutually beneficial contracts if they want to. If a bunch of private donors feel that farms are natural and beautiful and they want to pay money to a landowner to preserve a farm, I don't see any valid reason to interfere with that private transaction.
As Matt points out, "tax break" isn't special treatment for these easements. It's just a recognition that the private contract signed by the parties (the easement) has reduced the value of the land and that means it gets taxed less.
Around 10% of the London Greenbelt is brownfield land, so old industrial land or car parks, there doesn't seem to be any value in protecting that.
I think this is a challenging problem because in general I think markets are a very good at allocating resources for land and I’m sure the state of Kansas wouldn’t turn into Hong Kong but for regulations. But wilderness really is something that markets place no value on.
I don’t really want to see all wildlife contained to what few national parks we can make a case that they have transcendent beauty alone. Seeing nature reduced to a sort of park zoo in a tiny proportion of the earth we’ve set aside feels like a tragic loss.
There's a lot of land here out West that's never going to be suitable for almost all kinds of development, and thus it becomes suitable for national forests or range land or what have you.
People want to believe that farmers are proud custodians of the land who pat their animals on the head before running their hands through stalks of wheat in a field like Russell Crowe in Gladiator. People like the idea of 'naturalness', which is where the fixation against so called ultraprocessed food comes from. Of course, real farming should be as industrial as the manufacture of microchips. The ideal should be something like the farm at the start of Blade Runner 2049 - abundant food, efficiently grown.
You see this pattern everywhere - a popular conception rooted in a romantic past that probably didn't even exist, even as technology has lowered prices, increased output, and made the entire endeavor safer and more productive.
People love artisans, but if you want a pacemaker or airplane turbine, you want something manufactured with tolerances measured in microns. Nobody says: "I wish my MRI machine had been handcrafted."
The other point that I'm surprised Matt didn't point out is that if a community is going to have urban growth boundaries of any kind, be it for actual wilderness or cutesy farms or artificially constructed outdoor recreation or whatever, it needs to be even *more* allowing than typical of all kinds of building within the UGB. But that often isn't allowed either! It sounds like that's a big problem in the UK. And small resort towns in the US are also underratedly terrible for this, UGB or not. Protecting wilderness in those places makes a lot of sense, but given that, the remaining deleveloped land needs to be much denser for people to live in and have jobs in.
I like that Matt is reminding us here that farms aren't an inherently natural or even good use of any specific parcel of land. It's all contingent in the end. In addition to the housing fights, we're also seeing this distorted "farms are the most natural land use" argument deployed in fights to block energy infrastructure.
Many rural areas are going through battles where local farmers and other landowners try to block energy projects like utility scale solar, wind, and transmission projects. The true reason for these fights is usually that the farmers and other landowners don't want to their views spoiled. But rather than offering to buy the views they don't own, they deploy this fake "farms are the most natural and best land use" argument instead.
The irony is that many of these small boutique farmers are running fairly inefficient and wasteful operations because they don't have the scale needed to farm economically and efficiently. So they spew excess fertilizer and pesticides and waste tons of water. Meanwhile, the energy projects they oppose, aside from changing view sheds, barely have any true impact on the environment at all. That is, aside from reducing the amount of pollution in the air.
Are conservation easements actually permanent though? If it’s true that they reduce the value of the property, that would seem to create a loophole for the Fifth Amendment. A government could just remove the easement, offer $0 in “just compensation”, and still come out ahead.
I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that these easements don't actually destroy any value. There are two things of value, the land and the land's development rights. The easement separates these two value components and leaves one with the landowner and the other with the trust that holds and manages the easement. The development rights "value" is still there, it's just held in a trust that is operated with rules that keep the value "locked up" perpetually.
So I think theoretically, if the state wanted to take the land through eminent domain, they'd have to pay the landowner for the reduced value land and also pay the trust for the development rights that are locked up.
One thing I think some of the anti-British yimby discourse overlooks is maybe rather than Britain being weird, the issue is that as the first country to industrialise, Britain was merely the first to exhibit nimby pathologies that come for all countries as suburbs form, affluence rises and cities lack natural places to expand. I do think a big offer on saying, "we're going to massively cut back on the green belt but what green spaces we leave, will be much more focused on creating genuine green space that people can enjoy" might be the way to solve the issue. But it would be expensive.
On farming, an overlooked issue is that encouraging smallholding farms, makes for inefficient farms because they lack the size or capital required to make intensive methods practical or financial rewarding. Its one of the reasons our farms (which are smaller than European ones let alone American farms) produce food that is so much more expensive. Clarkson's Farm on Amazon Prime has explored this a lot.
Smallholding farms also operate under more cost pressure (no economies of scale) which leads structurally to be needing to push the land more intensively - which pushes towards soil exhaustion (and/or intensive use of inputs to offset soil exhaustion).
As someone who loves both nature and dense urban areas, wouldn't supporting urban greenbelts and conservation easements be a sort of double or nothing strategy to force development through density/upzoning, rather than perpetual sprawl (which I personally hate both aesthetically and also for its environmental impacts)?