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Harvesting profits over crops

Farmers are selling land to developers who offer deals they can't pass up.

By CRAIG PITTMAN and DAN DeWITT
Published April 23, 2006

RIDGE MANOR - Six years ago, Thurman Hatten bought a 75-acre dairy farm in rural Hernando County, figuring he would be there awhile.

But then two-story houses began springing up within sight of his barn. Neighboring farmers were selling out to developers for as much as $40,000 an acre, nearly seven times what Hatten had paid.

Last year, a developer offered Hatten, 60, a similar price. He loves farming, but he just couldn't turn down that much money.

"Every dairy farm in Florida is for sale for the right price," said Hatten's wife, Tabitha, 35.

Florida has been losing farmland to development for decades, but in recent years the losses have sharply increased. The state's leading expert on the agricultural economy, University of Florida professor John Reynolds, estimates the state is losing 150,000 acres of farmland a year.

That's an area slightly larger than Pinellas County disappearing every 12 months as rows of crops turn into rows of houses.

In the Panhandle, pine plantations are being cut down to make room for vacation homes, while near Lake Okeechobee sugar farmers have proposed turning 14,000 acres into suburbs.

State officials acknowledge that the steady loss of farmland poses a serious problem. If you don't like depending on foreign oil, imagine depending on foreign-grown food, state Agriculture and Consumer Services Secretary Charles Bronson warned.

"What if Brazil says, "The heck with America! No more food! Or pay through the nose for it!' " Bronson asked, picking one foreign nation that now competes with Florida farmers.

Bronson said he's trying to turn the trend around by aggressively marketing Florida produce overseas and drumming up support for an ethanol industry.

But legislative efforts to halt the loss of farmland have run into opposition from farmers themselves. They don't want to lose the option of cashing in.

"We don't have any big retirement accounts," said Steve Melton, whose family has farmed in Pasco and Hernando counties for more than 50 years. "When we get ready to retire, we want the right to sell the land as we see fit."

Florida farmers produce everything from blueberries to watermelons, not to mention tobacco, peanuts, cotton, chickens and beef. Florida ranks ninth among the 50 states in the value of farm products, with 2003 cash receipts of more than $6-billion.

Agriculture is more than just a business. Farmland provides habitat for a variety of wildlife and helps replenish the underground drinking supply. And the state's agricultural products have long served as Florida's calling card in colder states.

"Indian River oranges and Ruskin tomatoes, as much as the beach and the postcard, helped shape Florida's image as a winter paradise and bountiful dream state," University of South Florida professor Gary Mormino wrote in his book Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.

In the early 1960s, Mormino said, anyone who climbed the 226-foot Citrus Tower in Clermont could see 17-million citrus trees stretching across Central Florida. Now the view is nothing but rooftops.

Farmers say they're being squeezed out by soaring land prices, the pressures of eking out a profit against global competition and the burden of paying a hefty inheritance tax when a landowner dies.

Land prices are the biggest factor, with speculators clamoring for undeveloped property they can sell to builders, Reynolds said. In South Florida, some buyers were paying $137,500 per acre.

"Pretty much all the agricultural land in the state of Florida is now worth more for alternative uses than for its underlying agricultural use," said Peter Spyke, a longtime citrus grower from Fort Pierce.

Floridians first became alarmed about losing farmland in the 1950s, when the GI Bill and air conditioning sparked the post-World War II boom. New suburbs drove up the taxable value of nearby farms, and escalating taxes forced more farmers to sell.

So in 1959 the Florida Legislature passed a greenbelt law, one of the first of its kind in the nation, to give the farmers a tax break. Rather than assessing taxes based on what the land would be worth if developed, the law said county appraisers should base taxes on the value of farming operations.

Florida's greenbelt law has remained unaltered for four decades. But from 1954 to 2004, the state still lost more than 8-million acres of farmland.

The problem: Developers take advantage of it too.

Most states with greenbelt laws require that landowners who want to qualify to cultivate a certain number of acres, turn a profit, promise not to build, or pay back taxes when they do develop.

Florida has no such criteria.

So in Hernando County, for instance, some large farms that enjoy greenbelt status also are the sites of proposed development projects. They're not on land designated as rural and they're not even owned by farmers.

One is a 1,380-acre parcel owned by the MAK Family Partnership, whose main owner is Jim Kimbrough, chairman and chief executive of SunTrust Bank/Nature Coast.

Although now covered in planted pines, the land is the future site of the Sunrise development: 4,800 residential units and 430,000 square feet of retail. Valued at $7.1-million, the greenbelt exemption means the taxes are only $3,880.

State Sen. Steve Geller, D-Hallandale Beach, said he used to drive by land near Fort Lauderdale that a developer had completely cleared, but it had four cows on it so it could get a greenbelt exemption.

"People were having to shoo the cows away from the bulldozers," Geller said. "But as long as you call up Hertz Rent-A-Cow and have six cows on the property, then you're still entitled to the agricultural exemption."

This spring Geller and Rep. Juan Zapata, R-Miami, introduced bills to tighten the greenbelt loopholes. Under Zapata's bill, property owners would lose their greenbelt exemption after requesting permits showing "an intent to change the land use."

Farm lobbyists opposed it.

"Why change a statute that has worked well for many years?" said Ben Parks of the Florida Farm Bureau.

Both bills were killed at their only committee hearing. The best the sponsors could get was a promise of a study of the issue.

"We made some progress in the sense that people are willing to talk about this," Zapata said. "But there's going to be a lot of pressure from agriculture to maintain the status quo, and frankly the status quo is unacceptable."

Instead of backing a greenbelt change, for the past three years the Farm Bureau has pushed a bill that would make it easier to develop farmland.

Commonly called the "agricultural enclave bill," it would give farmers more power to put high density development on their land if 75 percent of the surrounding property is either developed or planned for development.

Nat Roberts, general manager of 4,000-acre Callery-Judge Grove in Palm Beach County, said the bill protects farmers who are stuck trying to farm amid encroaching development. They could be sure to get a fair price for their land someday if they choose to continue farming even after they are surrounded by neighbors who oppose more growth.

"You want that farmer to believe that it is economically safe to continue farming as neighbors move in around him," Roberts said. "You want that farmer going 15 years more than he would otherwise."

However, the owners of Callery-Judge Grove don't want to keep going. They want to turn the grove into 10,000 new homes and more than 1.3-million square feet of retail space. Palm Beach officials oppose the project because it exceeds what their growth plan allows.

The enclave bill passed two years ago, but Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed it. He may do so again if it passes this year, spokesman Russell Schweiss said, because it takes away a local government's right to manage growth.

In some cases the law would apply to parcels as large as 5,200 acres, which Kriss Vallese of the Florida Association of Counties pointed out is "the size of a small city." If passed, she said, it "could serve as an incentive for (farmers) to go ahead and cash out rather than preserve farmland."

Five years ago, agricultural lobbyists and environmental advocates worked together to pass one of the most promising state programs to preserve farmland, the Rural and Family Lands Protection Act.

The law allows the state to sell bonds to raise as much as $100-million a year to buy development rights from farmers so they can make a profit and still keep their land.

But the state never put any money into the program because Bush objected to accumulating additional bond debt, said Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland, who sponsored the act and tried repeatedly to get it funded.

Plus, she said, many farmers did not like the idea of giving up their development rights. For the first time in five years, Dockery hasn't tried to fund the program.

"I sort of said, "Why waste my time?' " she said. "I think the time to preserve those ag lands has come and gone . . . $100-million just doesn't go very far."

The picture is not entirely bleak, Dockery said, noting that the state is using its environmental land preservation program, Florida Forever, to buy some farms - although that usually means the farming stops.

She predicted the main force driving the conversion of farmland to development, the raging real estate market, cannot keep up its pace much longer.

"Common sense would dictate that this is a frenzy," she said.

Hatten, for one, would like it if the market slowed down. His sales contract won't close until some of the surrounding land is developed. So Hatten, who has been in dairy farming for 46 years, will likely be in it for at least another year, and he's fine with that.

"This is all I know," he said. "I enjoy being around the cows. You're out in the open spaces. This has been a lot of fun."

[Last modified April 23, 2006, 22:10:03]