Defining Farms

The term agriculture is broadly defined in the East Hampton and Southampton Town Codes. This is as easily discernible in Bridgehampton or Water Mill, where the landscape near Scuttlehole Road is now marked by horse farms, as on Long Lane in East Hampton, where rows and rows of Japanese maples and ornamentals stand tall.

Potatoes no longer are king. Like other aspects of the economy on the East End, agriculture has changed with the times. The stables and outbuildings for a horse farm now going up on the eastern end of Scuttlehole Road look enormous and the surrounding agricultural reserve is mostly mud. But, like any building site, it will soon be finished and become part of a landscape of grass paddocks and grazing horses. It won't be potatoes or corn, but it's still rural and it's still agricultural.

The neighbors who surround the proposed Kilmore Horse Farm in Wainscott are strongly opposed to it, arguing that the use and buildings are inappropriate for the site. Many argued at a recent Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee meeting that they bought their property because it adjoined a farmed parcel and that a 7,200-square-foot indoor riding ring, stables, and a garage would ruin the open space the agricultural easement was meant to protect.

David Eagan and Mary Ann McCaffrey's 14-acre site has indeed been designated as an agricultural preserve, which requires that the land remain in agriculture for perpetuity. Agricultural easements are designed to preserve good soils and open vistas when farmland is subdivided.

Farming, of whatever kind, is a business. Farmers can grow only so much corn and potatoes to satisfy the market. Those who choose to grow landscaping stock, rather than vegetables, or to board, breed, and train horses, are doing so because today's market calls for it.

A horse farm is permitted in an agricultural zone in East Hampton by special permit. Additionally, the Town Code sets a strict limit on the size of buildings that can serve any agricultural use: Only 2 percent of an agricultural parcel may be covered by buildings. In the case of the Kilmore Horse Farm, the applicants have agreed to meet that restriction.

A horse farm, like a potato farm, needs a barn. The barn in the Kilmore case, however, is described as having an indoor riding ring and this has been the main source of conflict. If the building is related to the "boarding, breeding, raising, or training of horses," then Kilmore is entitled to have it.

Several years ago, when a company called Equus proposed to raise, train, and sell polo ponies on what had been a potato farm, controversy erupted. Opponents ruled that polo matches were not an agricultural use; a judge, however, ruled that, if the "agriculture" was raising and training polo ponies, polo matches were integral.

The debate over the Kilmore Horse Farm comes down to aesthetic preferences. The neighbors would rather see traditional farming continue, forgetting that the use of pesticides sometimes contaminated the water supply and that the fields, at least in the old days, often turned into dust bins.

Ninety-eight percent of the 14-acre Kilmore Horse Farm is to remain as pasture. It's hard to find fault with that.