Equity Issues in Farmland Preservation

The literature dealing with farmland preservation has concentrated on program effectiveness and legal aspects. Equity issues, and to a lesser extent political issues have been neglected in these discussions. This major paper discusses equity issues involved with this topic: Basically who benefits and who is adversely effected by implementing farmland preservation measures. It relates these equity issues to both the legal and political issues of farmland preservation. It is argued in this major paper that to understand any one of these issues, all three must be fully addressed. The paper starts out by describing the following farmland preservation techniques: Exclusive agricultural zoning, large-lot zoning, fixed-area based zoning, slide-scale zoning, cluster zoning, Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs), Purchase of Development Rights (PDRs), Transfer of Development Rights (TDRs), conservation easements, Smart Growth programs, use-value taxation, and agricultural districting. It also describes their relative effectiveness. The next section describes the equity, legal, and political issues and relates these issues to the preservation techniques previously described. This section is followed by a conclusion that brings the previous two sections together and comes up with a final effectiveness rating for each farmland preservation technique.