DEBUNKING THE AG PLAN
The three greatest factors in the fast-track approval of the Lansing Agriculture and Farmland Protection Plan were:
1. The plan was never critically examined or allowed to be publicly questioned.
2. Lansing’s rural families were unrepresented by any agency or government representative, and prevented from having any meaningful participation in the plan themselves.
3. The lives and welfare of rural families living in Lansing were of no importance to the people who created and supported this plan.
This article will examine the Lansing Ag Plan itself. The biggest difficulty in debunking the Ag Plan is that its 55 pages are filled with so much distorted, misrepresented, and false information that it would take an even longer report just to untangle it all. [A detailed examination and critique was submitted to all the planning parties prior to its approval.] I will select a few of the more egregious Ag Plan “inaccuracies” as approved by the Lansing Town Board and ratified by the Lansing Comprehensive Plan.
The Importance of Agriculture to the Local Community
“Agriculture is an immensely significant part of the Town’s economy…” states the Plan “Total farm product sales in the town are estimated to be around $20 million per year with about $17 million attributed to dairy farming.” — These sales are not “in town,” there are no milk processing plants or wholesale businesses in Lansing, and even the milk trucking company is located in another county. Lansing farms are closed systems, with almost all the sales money recycled within the business or paid to outside vendors — only a trickle is leaked to the local community.
“Total tax liability paid by farmers in the Town of Lansing – $945,407” — More than two thirds of this was for school taxes, and most of that money was returned to farmers through the New York State Farmer’s School Tax Credit: a program that reimburses farmers for up to 100% of their school taxes from taxes levied on other New York State residents.
Lansing farmers can also take advantage of:
- The New York State Investment Credit, an investment tax credit for farmers at 4% of the purchase price of qualified real estate, equipment, livestock and other tangible business property acquired, constructed, reconstructed or erected during the tax year.
- A 10-year property tax exemption for agricultural structures and buildings that exempts them from any increase in the property’s assessed value resulting from the improvement.
- Complete exemptions on silos, grain storage, bulk tanks and manure facilities, and temporary greenhouses.
- Reduced assessments on farm and forestry land.
In addition, New York tax law exempts farmers from state and local sales and use taxes for fuel, gas, electricity, refrigeration or personal property used for production/operation; motor vehicles used predominantly for production/operation; building materials used for farm buildings or structures; services to install, maintain or repair farm buildings or structures.
And they can still receive all of the Star and other tax relief measures that ordinary residents are entitled to.
“The town’s farms provide a variety of jobs and thereby strengthen the local economy.” — Once again, a statement that misrepresents the true facts. Many of these jobs are given to foreign workers who live in housing provided and owned by the farmer with food provided by the farmer, and send most of their money out of the country to their families [a worst case scenario for both local and national economies.] Local workers can’t compete with laborers that live on the farm 24/7 and can support their families on fraction of what locals have to pay.
If all the farms in Lansing disappeared tomorrow and the fields were turned to meadows, it would scarcely cause a ripple in the local economy — and the water and the air would be cleaner, the bio-diversity and health of plants and animals would be increased, the taxes would be reduced, and the quality of life uplifted.
Farmers are “Stewards of the Land”
The Lansing Ag Plan’s cover features pictures of fruit trees, rolling hills, and heifers in a grassy field with a traditional red barn and silos in the background, but something’s missing… CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] and the Industrial Farming experience. It’s the type of “agriculture” that comprehensive planners and committee members would never want their children to live next to, and it’s the reason why rural families have been made powerless to affect the future of their own communities.
The word CAFO is not mentioned once in the Lansing Comprehensive Plan — which is significant considering that Lansing is home to the largest CAFO in the county and has extensive farmlands owned by even larger CAFOs in Cayuga County. It’s as if, by not mentioning it and pretending not to notice it, they don’t exist. It’s time to acknowledge theses “sewers of the land.”
“Farming practices protect soil, environmental quality, natural resources, and provide scenic working landscapes that preserve the rural character and enhance the quality of life of the town.” — This is a lie: Influential agribusiness interests have worked hard to portray rural neighbors as villains, while covering up the aggressive and invasive changes in “modern farming practices” that have polluted the air, land and water, and seriously injured residents.
• Soil used in modern “farming practices” must be cleansed of pollutants before it can be used for Organic farming; and if these farming practices, “preserve the rural character and enhance the quality of life of the town”; why did the Ag Plan Committee need to exclude 95% rural community from any participation in its drafting?
“Lansing Ag Days” at the town hall included antique tractors, a family sing-a-long, and a pie judging contest — deliberately presenting a mid-century vision of farming that is a lifetime away from the realities of industrial farming in Lansing today.
The Lansing Comp Plan deliberately ignores the massive negative impact that CAFOs and modern “farming practices” are having on Tompkins Count:
• During the summer of 2016, a retired Cayuga County farmer told me that his tenant was trucking 100,000 gallons of water a day from Cayuga Lake to supplement the dairy farm’s wells [the average unrestricted water use for a family of four is 320 to 400 gallons a day]: with this kind of profligate water usage; it easy to see how modern CAFOs threaten whole aquifers, and not just the wells of neighbors.
• Millions of gallons of liquid manure [a fermented mixture of urine, manure, antibiotics, heavy metals like copper sulfate, bacteria, and antibiotic resistant pathogens] are stored in leak-prone, under regulated containment ponds on the slopes of Cayuga Lake tributaries like Salmon Creek.
• Cayuga Lake is already threatened as a source of drinking water according to the DEC, and it’s getting worse. [According to government studies: Farming activities contribute more than four times the pollution of every other source combined.]
• Famer’s drain fields with underground pipes; greatly increasing the speed and quantity of stormwater runoff, and the erosion of fields without cover plants is pervasive. [A county engineer told me that farm fields that used to take hours to drain; now take minutes: filling and overflowing the roadside ditches that empty into streams and the lake with an opaque brown liquid. The County’s solution? Dig bigger ditches.]
• While clamping down on wood heating [an essential source of warmth for many poor rural families] the Comp Plan ignores agricultural open burning exemptions that allow farms to burn as much “agricultural waste” as they want, whenever they want. [This includes but is not limited to vines, trees and branches from orchards, leaves and stubble, paper feed bags, wood shavings used for livestock bedding, bailing twine, and other non-plastic materials.] The dense smoke plumes from the inefficient burning of house-size piles of agricultural waste can be seen 20 miles away.
• Agricultural laws override our wetlands protection and exempt farmers in “grazing and watering livestock, making reasonable use of water resources, harvesting natural products of the wetlands, selectively cutting timber, draining land or wetlands for growing agricultural products and otherwise engaging in the use of wetlands or other land for growing agricultural products…” Wetlands and their biodiversity are disappearing: replaced by the spreading monoculture landscape of industrial farming.
• Not only is agriculture exempted from most air, water and land pollution control measures, but compliance with much of the rest is “voluntary,” and the regulations in place are deliberately ineffective measures that favor Agribusiness profits above the welfare of the community.
“Protecting” Agriculture
Far from being the victims of current planning policies and rural “neighbors”; farming is the most privileged and exempted business in New York State. And while other rural residents are in a month-to-month struggle to hang onto the homes their family has lived in for generations, Lansing’s farmers are looking forward to cutting a deal that will secure their farms [and all the Lansing Ag Zone] for themselves, their children and the future.
• When one renting landowner was able to lease a few acres of land for a solar array [at a much higher rate than farmers will pay], the response from farmers and the Comp Plan was immediate: “Additionally, while the development of more renewable energy in the Town is certainly encouraged (see Sustainability: Energy and Climate Change), it is believed that the development of “solar farms” at the expense of prime agricultural land would be a misuse of a valuable resource.” Showing that, while Lansing’s town government and its planners routinely ignore public citizen participation; they are sensitive to the welfare of rich and important private interests. The County’s rural policies insure that renting landowners, who rent nearly half of the land being farmed in Lansing, bear the brunt of high taxes and land assessments: forcing many to sell their land for “chump change” or lose money every year. And the biggest farms get bigger, and richer.
The Lansing Ag Plan never says it will protect existing farms or small farms.
Not even the state Dept. of Agriculture believes in this policy — NYS Agriculture and Markets law talks about a “competitive” industry and repeatedly uses the phrase “viable agriculture.” And since the largest farms have the economy of scale, the profitability and the money to put smaller farms out of business, and since their only limit to growth is the availability of land, they have both the ability and incentive to do so, and that is what they are doing.
The policies of the Lansing Ag Plan will only accelerate this process. By rejecting the local rural community and siding with powerful Ag interests, these small farms have lost the only long term support they have.
The idyllic agricultural community; so confidently set down in Lansing’s Ag and Comp plans does not exist in this century. There are no towns where modern farming practices have protected the soil, environmental quality and natural resources – no communities where they have preserved the rural character and enhanced the quality of life of the town. There are no examples to be shown, because all the examples show just the opposite — polluted rivers and wells, sickened neighbors, struggling local economies, and unemployment. Poor rural families dominated by CAFOs: eroded landscapes of manure “lagoons” that are devoid of the farm animals whose shortened, antibiotic and hormone-filled lives are confined to a few square feet in a giant shed.
So at the end of the Lansing Agriculture and Farmland Protection Plan we are left with one important question:
“What sort of an agricultural community will we turn out to be?”
While there are no current examples of successes, the failures are really scary.
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This long article shows how important elite policy making is to the big players in the county. Even though I wrote and distributed a report detailing the inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and untruths in this “Cornell Cooperative Concoction”; it was never questioned by any local or county authority; in fact, they had a hand in promoting it.
On a number of occasions, after I had spoken out; one of these authorities would ask me [with that practiced look of puzzlement] “What is it you want?” Every time I would answer: “I want the Ag Plan writer’s discriminatory assertion that “nobody but farmers deserve to live here” retracted, and for rural residents to have meaningful participation in planning the future of their own community.” Every time; there was no reply — only silence.
Many rural residents are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals. Some are certain my herbicide spraying was payback for my unwelcome activism.
When elite policy making flows down to the rural poor; it plays hardball.
The old “Stewards of the Land” (we make the world better) wheeze has been replaced by the darker “We Feed the World” (you need us to live) threat; but when the Ag Plan was being written; there was still a little shine left on it.
The “cows in a field with red barn” photos and Ag Days “Dairy Queen and her Court” stuff is for the incomers who wouldn’t know hydrogen sulfide from hydrogen peroxide; and see rural poverty as a quaint roadside view from their speeding BMW.
Local, county, and state authorities parrot sugary drivel like a visitor’s brochure; while media outlets regurgitate handouts. Are these Agribusinesses that important; or are we that unimportant? Both.
The little farms and traditional farming families were just the patsy “poster children” for the big CAFOs. Farming is an occupation that speaks “corporate” these days.
Even large farms in Lansing with the latest farming practices are being pressured to sell to the biggest dairy farm in the state.
A parting concern: CAFOs are an ideal environment for breeding a pandemic. Money not only talks; it seals lips.