 In the 1880s, agriculture was just taking hold in Indiana. Settlers moving east open up vast tracts of land for farming. As the trees came down, crops went in. The course for the state was set. Today, agriculture is one of Indiana's primary industries. Each year, Indiana agriculture and food processing pump more than $17 billion into the economy and support more than 500,000 jobs statewide. To consumers cruising in the of Indiana's interstate highways, the roadside view might lead you to believe the state is covered with corn, beans and hog farms. There's no argument that corn, at 29% of the total agricultural income, soybeans at 25% and hogs at 13% are the big three. But Indiana is much more. A comprehensive look at Indiana's agriculture reveals a somewhat surprising diversity, including wheat, dairy, beef, poultry, especially chickens and ducks, vineyards, fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes, mint, melons, and let's not forget all the food processing necessary to make these commodities consumer ready. What is the foundation of all this agricultural diversity? Farmland, the earth, the soil that supports all the crops and livestock in our state. 58% of Indiana's land base is used to grow food and other products for consumers next door and worldwide. Indiana ranks second nationally in the percent of land statewide that is considered prime farmland. But every hour the state loses more than 10 acres of farmland to pavement, houses, factories or other uses, as much as 219 acres per day are lost. More than 80,000 acres are lost each year. Overall, Indiana has lost more than 1 million acres of farmland since 1990, and as a recent editorial in the Indianapolis Star lamented, of particular concern is that the best farmland is being developed three to four times faster than non-productive or marginal land. Scott Everett is the director of the Central Great Lakes Region of the American Farmland Trust. A lot of people talk about urban sprawl and the influences on agriculture. Our forefathers were smart people, especially in Indiana, because they settled in parts of Indiana that were the best farmland. Indiana's Lieutenant Governor, Joe Kernan, is also the state's commissioner of agriculture. We have almost 16 million acres of farmland in the state of Indiana, and it's among the best farmland in the world. Therefore, the responsibilities that we have today and will continue to have for as long as Indiana exists, will have something to do with producing food and fiber, not just for Hoosiers and not just for Americans, but for the rest of the world. Looking to the future, the amount of farmland lost in the past few years might pale compared to the prospects for the next several years. Indiana is facing a critical period as the inevitable change of generations occurs. Demographically speaking, half of all the farmland in the state of Indiana is owned by farmers older than 55 years of age. We have farmers in the state of Indiana that are 10 to 15 years away from retirement that own half of the farmland. When you think about, given the land use trends, what is going to happen to that land when they're ready to retire? Don Villwalk, president of the Indiana Farm Bureau, sees the change coming in their organization's membership. I think it will be the largest land turnover we've witnessed in recent years. I think we need to be smart about that. We need to make sure that these retiring farmers know what their options are. The age of our population is going to mean that there will be a lot more acres in play in the coming years. According to experts at Purdue University, land values have been increasing steadily since 1988. The demand for development land in ever-widening circles around Indiana cities and towns is driving the value up. The difference in land value between development land and farmland could be as much as $4,000 or $5,000 per acre. Depending on where you look in the state, this difference in land value fuels much concern for the future. Mike Yoder, an Elkhart County dairy operator, sees the impact in his community. Over 20,000 people drive into the community every day to work. And what we noticed is land values increased. Farmers in this community were making an economic decision. They were saying, you know, I could sell my property for $5,000 to $6,000 an acre and move to another community and maybe double or triple my acres, and that made economic sense. For some farmers in these encroachment areas, the increase in land value might not be a bad thing. That land is Farmers 401k. It is their retirement. We don't want to diminish that for our farmers and for our farm members, but yet, too, how do we preserve farmland with keeping that in mind? Providing landowners with ways to take advantage of the equity in their land without selling it for development is the challenge Indiana and many states across the country are facing. Voluntary farmland preservation programs can maintain private property rights and land values and still allow farmers to realize the full value of their land without having to sell to development. The bridge that we need to cross as a community is to understand it's not just an individual right to do something, but that has a consequence for the community and the next generation. We also have some very fertile prairie soils in this county that with irrigation, 200 bushels of corn is no problem raising. We can do it. And we've turned that soil, that farmland, into shopping malls and industrial parks. Does that make sense? Mike Manning from Purdue Extension's Jasper County Office sees it as a cultural issue. We've actually come to a point in our society where most people don't have an agricultural background. That is the challenge, is to make them understand how important the food and fiber industry is and why we need to live together in harmony. It comes back to trying to somehow verbalize what is the value of agriculture to this community and it's got to go beyond dollars and cents. It has to go to that quality of life issue and adding balance. One of the difficult parts of this issue of land preservation, of farmland preservation is the fact that you are trying to strike a balance between property rights and the broader community interest and certainly different parts of Indiana have different views on that. So what does this mean? Unmanaged growth, rising land values and farmers nearing retirement are a recipe for urban sprawl. This is our pattern of taking housing subdivisions and mini malls and that sort of thing and putting them on the outskirts of our cities and towns out in the countryside. The first steps of urban sprawl that I don't think people recognize and that they can't see is land fragmentation. It is two and five and 20 and 25 acre parcels and the land is now fragmented and farmers are unable well the land is too small to farm and it's too big to mow. We created a new term called RADS, Random Acts of Development that are just a tremendous negative for our community because it increases cost of services for ambulance and fire and all that stuff that we know comes along with development. However, there is a growing awareness of the problem and a desire to grow smarter and preserve the rural character of our state. But how do we do that? There are three main strategies to growing smarter, creating sustainable communities and preserving the state's agricultural heritage. First, let's look at urban redevelopment. If you are not paving roads and building new sewers in prime farmland on the perimeter of your city, you have more money to make that city livable, sustainable and desirable. You can really look at it from this standpoint that by preserving farms and farmland that don't require a lot of those expensive community services. Cows don't go to school, chickens don't dial 911, corn, wheat and soybeans need a lot less fire and police protection than do residential and industrial and commercial development. Considering the demands of residential growth, roads, sewers, schools, when a medium income family builds a new house in a suburb, do the taxes they pay cover the extra public services they require? Larry DeBoer, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, has the answer. It turns out that residential development has a negative fiscal impact, almost all kinds of residential development. The additional property taxes and income taxes and fees and so forth that are paid by the people in the new houses are almost always not enough to cover the additional costs for schooling and roads and police and fire that the new residents demand. Agriculture, however, is just the opposite. Agricultural land uses create a positive fiscal impact. When Bill Hudnut was mayor of Indianapolis in the mid-1980s, urban redevelopment was one of the main issues he faced. There are those who think we're living now in what they call the re-century, RE, which stands for rebuilding, redesign, re-engineering, re-urbanizing, rehabilitating, reinforcing what we already have rather than going out and just developing new. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Creating new designs for growth and accommodating the amenities that people look for when choosing where to live encourages people to choose an urban environment. To get them to move into the city, you got to provide them with, well, you can't provide them with land. That's the point. You got to provide them with some mass transit. You got to provide them with some amenities they can't get out in the suburbs. It's beautiful over here and there's nothing like this out in the suburbs. When the Indiana Farm Bureau was looking to relocate its headquarters, decision makers recognized the opportunity to do the right thing. Our options were probably really to build with outside 465 forward to come downtown. If we're going to preserve farmland, we need to demonstrate that ourselves. And so we thought keeping the inter-core city of Indianapolis Strong being a partner, corporate partner downtown would work well for our mission. It was a double win for us. And so that's why we're located here. Some of the strongest supporters of farmland preservation should be, if they aren't already, should be urban core mayors and city council and our urban leadership of the state of Indiana. The second strategy is to recognize the reality that development will occur, but under what conditions and guidelines? I think we need that growth in a planned way that fits in with the needs of the community and also the needs of the farmland owner. Helter-Skelder development over an 80-acre track versus smart growth where we cluster in one corner of the 80 acres makes a lot more sense. The key thing I think is to create that kind of a comprehensive plan for the city that does preserve green space and does encourage compact development. There are various different ways to do it so that you don't have the farms being sold off three acres at a time for the development of a single family dwelling unit. This is not an anti-development strategy. We want to preserve the best farms and the best farmland in rural Indiana. It's not about preserving every single acre. The third strategy builds a long-term environment for agriculture by preserving and protecting farmland with permanent conservation easements. The goal being to create a contiguous block of protected farmland that affords farmers a feeling of permanence and the confidence to make long-term investments in their operations. Farmland protection is not for the faint of heart. It should be taken as seriously and as much discussion as new growth and development takes. What farmland protection is really all about are communities that value their agriculture, that want agriculture to be their long-term and are willing to invest in their local agriculture just as they're willing to invest in new growth and development or new commercial and industrial development. It's absolutely no different. Mike Yoder found a model of sorts in Elkhart County. Ironically, it came from the source of much of the pressure on agricultural lands in that county, manufacturing plants. Even so, making the case was not easy. We've accomplished in this county three additional agriculture protective zones, which we modeled in a sense after the manufacturing zones. We said, we're a manufacturing plant. It's just that it's agriculture. It's not RVs or modular homes. And so we had some success there. Then we just continued that thought process and said, well, if we create TIF districts, tax incremental financing districts for manufacturing, why not do that for agriculture? And so I have agreed to go into one of the agriculture zones which limit or just basically say, I will not develop. In Jesper County, Kendall Culp stepped up before things got too far along and rallied neighbors to action. Well, we're fairly unique here in this county because of the influx of urban growth from the region, the Calumet region in the northern part of our county. And we recognized that several years ago. And so we tried to be proactive and were able to introduce and get past a subdivision ordinance that would protect agriculture from those encroaching subdivisions. Accomplishing a change like this starts by building a local consensus. I think that first and foremost, you have to bring the players in. You've got to bring in all the different avenues and they all have to have an opportunity to have their voice heard. Something else that helped, there was no cases, there was no problem or litigation at that point in time in the county. So there really wasn't a perceived problem. What we thought was there could be a future problem down the road with encroachment if we didn't do something about it now. Landowners possess a bundle of property rights that can be sold or severed separately from the land. Perhaps the most common are the mineral rights. However, there are several other property rights including development rights. The value of the development rights is generally the difference between the value of the land for agriculture and the potential development value of the land. Looking to the future, purchasing or donating these development rights may be attractive to farmers and communities. By selling or donating development rights a landowner accepts a permanent easement on the property prohibiting development. It doesn't reduce any other private property rights and it doesn't prohibit expanding or changing the agricultural operation. The land can be sold, but the easement remains and the land remains in agriculture. Cathy Lats represents the Woodland Lakes Resource Conservation and Development Group in Angola, Indiana. At this point, the people that we have worked with have donated these development rights or the subdivision rights to our group. There are other groups out there that purchase the development rights. Other groups also accept donations of land if landowner wanted to donate the farm as a whole. There are creative ways, though, to replace that value, those development rights whether that's through some kind of a trust that's developed, some kind of a partnering with the city. Purchase of development rights, I would say, from my experience has been the most successful in the country due to its voluntary nature and the idea of purchasing the developmental equity voluntarily from farmers. It's one of these decisions that take a lot of landowners a long time to make because, again, what we're looking at is holding these development rights for the life of the land. Protection and preservation are not always money issues. The intrinsic and environmental values of farmland can play major roles in decisions and actions. As we discuss this issue as a community, we actually try and move this discussion away from just a pure dollars and cents type of an issue. And what are some of those intangibles that come with living in an agriculture community? I think about when I grew up with other people that have lived in the city and on a bad day, where would they go for driving the country? And they didn't feel like being in a town and looking at big buildings, but they wanted to be out on the back roads and looking at woods and seeing wildlife and seeing agricultural land. I remember some of the early public meetings. People said that, you know, it's beginning to be like you can drive from Goshen to Elkhart to Mishawaka to South Bend. You can't tell where one city stopped and another begins. And we don't like that. Environmentally, farmland provides important wildlife habitat, maintains groundwater recharge and watershed protection. Biological diversity, meaning the differences among species that allow for evolution and adaptation, can be one of the environmental casualties to the onslaught of development. Purdue Forestry and Natural Resource Professors Rob Swighart and Barney Dunning point to the obvious outcome of urban sprawl. Well, I think the biggest single threat to biological diversity in Indiana today is habitat loss and fragmentation. By that we mean creating little patches of these remaining habitats, little remnants. And when that happens, then the populations of wildlife that are found in those small patches of habitat get more and more isolated and the species goes locally extinct. It's a real challenge now in land use planning to figure out how to have this kind of growth without having the negative effects on our natural habitats that urban sprawl can represent. Agriculture is changing and farmers are changing the way they do things to increase profitability. Increased profitability reduces the attraction of selling for development. Adding value to a raw commodity is a rising trend. In southern Indiana, in Knox County, Lewis Roosh Jr. is betting on flour for tortillas. Almost two years ago a man came here with a proposal that we start hauling and cleaning and bagging white corn and hauling it to a tortilla manufacturer in Atlanta, Georgia. We're hoping to get a coalition of farmers together, put our money into this building, build a business, and from that business produce corn masa flour. The corn flour price doesn't fluctuate as much or as often as the price of corn. Hopefully it's another thing that you're doing to keep your farm in existence for the future. To increase the value of his product, Stanley Poe Jr., Johnson County sheep rancher takes advantage of his proximity to the city. Then I was approached by the downtown Marriott Hotel which was the first contact I had with a restaurant. They wanted me to supply two special cuts. I've eliminated the middleman because I'm the contact between the chefs and the production side of it. We now do five restaurants. Started with the Marriott and through different restaurant reviews and magazine publications just word of mouth. We had other restaurants contact us, wanted to know if we could do the same for them. So, to recap. In the near future, Indiana is facing a potentially major shift in land ownership. There are several options available to farm owners and communities to address the issue at the local level. Preserving farmland provides economic, environmental and social benefits and is one valuable tool for communities planning for growth and agriculture. Farmers are finding ways to remain profitable through innovative value-added ventures, creating a desire to keep farmland in production. Overall, the goal is building a long-term positive environment for agriculture. If we consider Indiana agriculture is one of the most important industries in the state, there are ways, if we start in the next number of years, moving toward investment in agriculture. That's 16 million acres. We're not going to preserve every acre, but we certainly will preserve enough agriculture and enough land to be the economic contributor it is today.