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Saving the Farm On Long Island Sound; Agriculture Boomlet Revives Debate

By KIRK JOHNSON ( Series ) 1937 words

2003 August 13, Wednesday
METROPOLITAN DESK

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. -- One of the constants of life on Long Island for the last
half-century, so relentless as to seem almost a motor of history, has been the
steady swallowing up the farmland. Suburban development, roaring east from
New York City, changed the quality of the air and water, overwhelmed old
patterns of transportation and transformed the connections between people and
the land.

But now, here on the island's east end, there is a plot twist. To Ed Harbes, it is
called opportunity.

Mr. Harbes, a fifth-generation Long Island farmer, is doing quite well and wants
to expand his acreage, not contract. And he is not alone. Agriculture, in a part of
the nation that might seem the least likely of breadbaskets, is hot.

''The business has grown in very healthy fashion,'' said Mr. Harbes, 45, who
reinvented his farm in the late 1980's -- giving over the potato fields his father
cultivated to sweet corn and pumpkins that he sells to weekenders and tourists
from two farm stands. Chardonnay and merlot grapes for a Harbes winery were
planted this spring. Three of Mr. Harbes's eight children now say they want to
stay in the family business, which has taken on 10 new employees in the last few
years.

Here on Long Island Sound's southeastern edge, 70 miles from Manhattan, the
environmental and political implications of a strengthened farm economy are
immense, conservationists, farmers and local elected officials say. The question
of what land is saved, what is built upon, who profits and who loses -- a real
estate equation that has been at the heart of the Sound's environmental
trajectory for decades, if not centuries -- are all in play here as agriculture
asserts its muscle.

August 13, 2003, Wednesday

METROPOLITAN DESK

Saving the Farm On Long Island Sound; Agriculture Boomlet Revives Debate

By KIRK JOHNSON ( Series ) 1937 words

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. -- One of the constants of life on Long Island for the last
half-century, so relentless as to seem almost a motor of history, has been the
steady swallowing up the farmland. Suburban development, roaring east from
New York City, changed the quality of the air and water, overwhelmed old
patterns of transportation and transformed the connections between people and
the land.

But now, here on the island's east end, there is a plot twist. To Ed Harbes, it is
called opportunity.

Mr. Harbes, a fifth-generation Long Island farmer, is doing quite well and wants
to expand his acreage, not contract. And he is not alone. Agriculture, in a part of
the nation that might seem the least likely of breadbaskets, is hot.

''The business has grown in very healthy fashion,'' said Mr. Harbes, 45, who
reinvented his farm in the late 1980's -- giving over the potato fields his father
cultivated to sweet corn and pumpkins that he sells to weekenders and tourists
from two farm stands. Chardonnay and merlot grapes for a Harbes winery were
planted this spring. Three of Mr. Harbes's eight children now say they want to
stay in the family business, which has taken on 10 new employees in the last few
years.

Here on Long Island Sound's southeastern edge, 70 miles from Manhattan, the
environmental and political implications of a strengthened farm economy are
immense, conservationists, farmers and local elected officials say. The question
of what land is saved, what is built upon, who profits and who loses -- a real
estate equation that has been at the heart of the Sound's environmental
trajectory for decades, if not centuries -- are all in play here as agriculture
asserts its muscle.

But the shifting debate about the land also reflects a much deeper pattern on the
Sound -- how fundamentally its fate, for better and for worse, has always been in
the hands of local politics and passions. Although its deep waters, stretching out
110 miles from New York City to Rhode Island, have shaped much of the climate
and economy of the Northeast, historians say the Sound has always been like the
proverbial elephant as described by blind men -- understood by its parts, never
by the whole.

''You've got a resource that has so many different boundaries -- no one ever
looks at what the big picture is,'' said Tom Andersen, author of ''This Fine Piece
of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound'' (Yale University Press,
2002). ''The decisions are made in isolation. That's the Sound's character.''

That picture is clear in Riverhead, where the economics of farming and the
intricacies of zoning have become bound up with the Sound's fate along the
stretch of majestic bluffs and cliffs that form Riverhead's northern boundary on
the water.

Last year, town officials drafted a long-term development plan for Riverhead that
would have focused development along the Sound -- by far the most valuable
land in town -- as a way of preserving farmland in the interior. It was a trade-off
that many environmentalists condemned, and they threatened to push instead
for a plan the farmers hated -- a revision of the zoning rules that would sharply
reduce the value of any farmland sold for development.

The farmers fought back. Working through their trade group, the Long Island
Farm Bureau, they forged an unlikely political alliance of agricultural interests,
home builders and environmentalists, and they offered an alternative vision.

Their plan would preserve farmland values. Environmentalist support was
rewarded by shifting development away from the Sound and by aiming to save
more open space than the town's version would have. Builders would get a
streamlined development process -- and in perhaps the most divisive element of
all -- the ability to build higher density clustered homes at up to six units per acre
within the town's agricultural zone -- an area that was off limits under the town
plan.

Riverhead's elected town supervisor, Robert F. Kozakiewicz -- whose family's
farm here is still run by his parents and a brother -- said the plan was still being
debated. But he said he believes that substantial elements of the ''stakeholders
proposal,'' as the farmer-led effort is called, will probably be incorporated when
the town board votes this fall.

Some critics say the farmers and their allies have hijacked Riverhead's future --
horse trading to get everything they want now, in protecting the agricultural
industry, and everything they want in the future, in being able to sell out to a
housing developer when times change or retirement looms.

''It's a scheme,'' said Richard L. Amper, the executive director of Pine Barrens
Society, a conservation group based in nearby Manorville. ''What they are
producing is a shell game -- they're not reducing development, just moving it
around.''

Some farmers also oppose the plan -- especially the idea of building town houses
near the farms -- and are fighting back as well.

''The whole issue here is density,'' said Art Binder, a horse and bison rancher
who favors cowboy hats and is running for a seat on the Town Board this fall on
his opposition to the idea of higher-density housing in Riverhead. ''If you want to
save the farmland, then you just can't develop it at six units per acre.''

Both supporters and opponents agree that farming has changed. What had been
a mostly wholesale business subject to the fluctuations of national and global
markets, especially when potato-growing was king, has shifted to retail, specialty
foods and tourism -- or even further to what some people here call
''agri-tainment.'' (Mr. Harbes, for example, builds mazes in his corn fields for
children to wander through.) And the higher profit margins of that shift are
showing.

Between 1997 and 2001, farm cash receipts here in Suffolk County rose more
than 40 percent, to $5,543 an acre, according to the most recent figures from the
State Department of Agriculture and Markets. That was more than 10 times the
statewide average and far higher than any other county in New York.

And much of the rest of Riverhead's economy has gone along for the ride,
residents say. The dozens of small wineries that have sprung up on Long Island's
North Fork attract weekend tourists who like to shop at farm stands and who are
at least partly drawn by the idea of farm land itself, almost as a kind of a prop.
One resident is even pushing for a rule in the master plan that would require any
new homes built on farmland -- especially the clustered houses -- to look like
farm buildings, the better to fool the tourists.

That agricultural strength, in turn -- not to mention the tentacles it extends into
other aspects of the local economy, from restaurants to gas stations -- is what
gives preservationists here hope. Land on which people are making money, they
say, and in which farmers see a bright future, is simply less attractive to
development. Supporters of the farmer-led stakeholder plan say they hope to
permanently preserve up the 12,000 acres of farm open space, compared to
only 5,000 under the town's plan. About half of Long Island's total farmland of
34,000 acres is within Riverhead's borders.

''Preservation is terrific, but a strong agriculture industry is what's keeping this
area rural,'' said Timothy Caufield, a vice president at the Peconic Land Trust, a
conservation group.

And so, by such convoluted means and tangled trails, one of the last big
undeveloped coastal sections on all of the Sound may be saved -- not by the
dictates of an environmental regulator, but through the self-interested
give-and-take of the market.

''A relatively undeveloped Long Island Sound coastline is one of Riverhead's
largest assets,'' said Eve Kaplan, an environmentalist who helped put together
the stakeholder group.

Ms. Kaplan said she thinks there is an inevitable exchange for retaining the gift of
an undeveloped Sound. Development pressure is immense and cannot be
completely stopped. The things with highest priority are the ones that should be
saved, she said.

''You have to accept that some development is inevitable, and not everyone
wants to do that,'' she said.

Many people on both sides of the land conservation debate in Riverhead say that
much of what has happened here in rethinking how and where development
should occur comes down to one man, Richard Wines, 57, a soft-spoken former
Wall Street investor relations consultant. Even some people who vehemently
hate parts of the stakeholder proposal, like Mr. Amper at the Pine Barrens
Society and farmers like Mr. Binder, have only kind words to say about Mr.
Wines, even though he came up with many of the ideas.

Mr. Wines is a modest man who plays down his role. His strength, he said, is that
he can talk to all the power groups. As a former businessman, he said that he
understands the builders. As a small farmer, he knows that community as well.
But he also donated the development rights to his farm last year to the Peconic
Land Trust, which means that as long as there are lawyers to defend the claim,
the 15 acres of his little spread can never be built upon. That gave him capital,
he said, in talking to environmentalists.

Mr. Wines, sitting in front of his house a few feet from his potato field on a recent
afternoon, said he approached the land debate here in exactly the same way he
would have approached a deal-making conference on Wall Street: by making
sure that everyone at the table had an economic incentive to follow through.

''A business deal is most likely to succeed if all the parties benefit,'' he said.
''Land preservation needs to be the same way.''

Human Nature

Over many years of settlement, Long Island Sound has been a breadbasket and
a dumping ground, a private playground for the wealthy and a symbol of
environmental despair.

But when people reached for a new definition -- a repaired, restored, managed
Sound -- nature did not respond according to the rule book.

For every push to achieve a certain end, the whorls of the ecosystem have
pushed right back, often in unexpected ways.

This is the seventh article of a summer-long series on the evolving nature of
Long Island Sound. Part 8 will look for the imprint of the past, and the hints of
what may come. Research into the muck at the bottom and the web of life in the
water are producing some surprises.

Additional materials, including a preview of the last part of the series, are online
at nytimes.com/lisound.

CAPTIONS: Photos: Richard Wines, with his wife, Nancy Gilbert, knows about the
housing-agriculture debate in Riverhead. He has the perspective of being both a
businessman and a farmer.; Art Binder, a horse and bison rancher, is a
candidate for a seat on the Town Board in this fall's election. He opposes the idea
of higher-density housing in Riverhead. (Photographs by Angel Franco/The New
York Times)(pg. B8); With new housing sprouting up next to farmland in
Riverhead, N.Y., on Long Island Sound's southeastern edge, Rex Farr works
among his grapevines.; Customers examine the vegetables and delicacies at the
Harbes stand, part of the fifth-generation Long Island family farm. (Photographs
by Angel Franco/The New York Times)(pg. B1)

Chart: ''Green Acres''
By switching to higher-profit crops, Long Island farmers have increased their
income per acre.

Graph tracks cash receipts per acre from all farm products in Suffolk County
from 1994-2002.

(Source by New York Agricultural Statistics Service)

Map of Long Island highlighting Riverhead (pg. B8)

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Posted by dc at September 9, 2003 03:38 PM