Housing eating up farmland

OGDEN (AP) — Driven by a surging real estate market and soaring land prices, farmland in northern Utah counties is quickly disappearing to make way for houses.

The latest census shows a loss of about 10 percent of farms in the area over a five-year period, more than three times the state average loss of 3 percent.

"It takes an awful lot of money to be a farmer if you want to start in this county, I tell you," said Ron Stratford, a Weber County farmer who loses acreage yearly as landowners he leases from continually opt to sell their ground.

Some observers say it's further evidence that family farming doesn't pay anymore in Utah.

Richard Kestle, statistician for the Utah Agricultural Statistics Service, said 48 percent of Utah's farms had sales of less than $2,500 in 2002.

"These people are not making their living doing farming," he said. "Maybe they used to be a (productive) farm but they are still hanging on because they want their children to grow up on a farm."

"Fewer and fewer farms and ranches are producing the bulk of the agricultural product," he said.

In 2002, 2.5 percent of farms and ranches posted sales of more than $500,000 — amounting to 63 percent of all agricultural sales in the state.

Still, production overall in Utah is on the rise, leaving policy-makers with tough questions over just how to address the widening gap between large and small farmers.

The Cache County Commission recently refused to place an agricultural land and open space bond on the ballot in November. The bond would have raised $20 million and leveraged up to $60 million in federal funds, saving an estimated 25,000 acres of farmland in that county.

Another $150 million statewide referendum failed to get enough signatures to make the November ballot.

Doug Jackson Smith, a Utah State University sociology professor who studies the farm industry, said those failed initiatives wouldn't solve everything, but they would be a start.

"They are not a magic bullet that can save every farm or save the underlying farm economy.