How to Keep New York’s Farmland for Farmers

New York is vital for farming; far from its national reputation as merely an urban center, the state has seven million acres of farmland and is one of the biggest producers of dairy and apples. It also faces many of the same issues that face farmers around the country, with perhaps the biggest being simply holding onto, or gaining new, farmland. The National Young Farmers Coalition’s new paper has some concrete suggestions for how to combat these issues.  The difficulty existing farmers face keeping farmland, and the difficulty new farmers face finding farmland, are not unique to New York. But New York’s astronomical real estate prices have placed the state in an even more tenuous position than most. Land closer to New York City is preferable for farmers; the city has a thriving farmers market structure that can be invaluable to small-scale farmers. But as you get closer to the city, land values shoot up and become far out of the range of most farmers. And even the existing farmland outside the city? The NYFC’s research has found that it’s being purchased for second homes, and once farmland stops actively being farmed, it rarely goes back.But the state government has taken some interesting pains to try to keep farmland as farmland. This July, Governor Cuomo put forth a new funding roundfor what’s called the Farmland Protection Implementation Grant Program, or FPIG. The FPIG program restricts the use of farmland to farming, meaning that not just anyone can buy certain land, but it also goes a step further by including preemptive purchase rights. Essentially, this means that if farmland goes up for sale, farmers get first rights to purchase—and can use that FPIG funding to secure the land.