No Farmers, No Character

The bumper stickers used to be ubiquitous on the roads: “No Farms No Food.”

The slogan is a registered trademark of the American Farmland Trust, which mails out those bumper stickers for free to anyone in the United States who requests one. It’s a simple, accurate message, but it’s one that is lost on many people who think food comes from the grocery store or Amazon Fresh and forget that these retailers are merely intermediaries.

On the South Fork, one doesn’t need to drive far in any direction to come across farmland. It is one of the pleasures of living here and part of the reason why the region attracts so many visitors. The open space preserves the beauty of the area, but it is also working land, supplying many popular farm stands, farmers markets and restaurants, and producing trees, flowers and native plants for home and commercial landscapes.

Unfortunately, farmland here continues to become scarcer as luxury residential development gobbles up any land where development rights remain intact. The South Fork would have been worse off if not for the town-administered Community Preservation Fund in Southampton and East Hampton and the great work of the nonprofit Peconic Land Trust and its Farms for the Future Initiative. Peconic Land Trust offers farmland leasing and resale, as well as farmer support and apprenticeships.

More recently, East Hampton has introduced its own town-led program, and it now eying its third affordable working farm in three years to lease to up-and-coming farmers.

“At one time in our not-too-distant past, farmland was ubiquitous — but times change,” remarked East Hampton Town Director of Land Acquisition and Management Scott Wilson at a March 21 East Hampton Town Board public hearing on purchasing, with CPF money, a 16-acre agricultural preserve to add to its program. He pointed out that the CPF was created not just to preserve open space but farming itself.

Before towns became attuned to purchasing enhanced development rights, it was common for agricultural preserves — where the towns had purchased the simple development rights — to be turned into horse farms, complete with stables and groom housing, or extensions of estates’ green lawns. East Hampton’s farmland program ensures that not only are these unintended uses of agricultural preserves avoided, farmland becomes true working land under the stewardship of farmers who otherwise could not afford the land to raise crops on the South Fork.

It’s a concept that should be duplicated in Southampton Town, and the villages for that matter, before development pressure takes more opportunities off the table.

The South Fork will still be able to have food delivered in the absence of local farms, but there is no replacing the authentic rural character that farms, and farmers, lend to the region.