Food Yes, Christmas Trees No

In a move on Tuesday to buy additional restrictions on nearly 25 acres of south-of-the-highway land in Bridgehampton, the Southampton Town Board continued its efforts to ensure farm fields remain as such, authorizing the $2.46 million purchase of the enhanced development rights on Hayground Farms in Bridgehampton. The property lies off Montauk Highway next to Kellis Pond, across from the PSEG-Long Island station.

No one quite anticipated, according to John v.H Halsey, president of the Peconic Land Trust, that anyone without an interest in farming would buy restricted farm fields for other purposes, but it is perfectly legal within the framework of the preservation program. Any agricultural use is allowed to take place, from a horse stable to a Christmas tree farm. While legitimate uses, Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said at a hearing, they are not what the public has come to think of as farmland.

“This will kind of guarantee that it stays more in the spirit of the original program, right, of food production,” he said.

Despite decades of active farmland conservation, farms where fields are tilled and crops harvested are still threatened. “It’s only in the last decade problems became apparent,” Mr. Halsey said.

The purchase of the additional restrictions, which preclude equestrian use, nursery operations, and vineyards, and require that 80 percent of the farmland be used to grow food, is “a tool we’re seeing used in other parts of the country because of the realization that after a huge public investment to protect farmland it isn’t always actually farmed,” he told the board.

The purchase also provides the town a safety net: it comes with the right to lease the land to another qualified farmer if it lies fallow for more than two years.

The board agreed to pay the land trust, which owns the prime agricultural property, with money from the community preservation fund. Peter Dankowski has a five-year lease with the trust to grow corn and potatoes there. He never used a farm stand nearby at the side of the highway, but it could be resurrected in the future.

The land trust bought the parcel, including a 20-acre tract and three smaller lots, from the descendants of William Haines in 2013 for $125,000 an acre, using borrowed money from a conservation lender. Mr. Halsey said the town’s purchase will allow the trust to repay the debt.

“In the face of a real estate market where we’re seeing up to $200,000 per acre spent to purchase, in many instances by non-farmers, farmland that is sometimes being taken out of production altogether,” Mr. Halsey said, farmers who want to rent or purchase farmland can’t compete. Enhanced rights, he said, will “cap” the value of the land in the future to about $25,000 per acre, as with the Bridgehampton farmland, with an appreciation over time of 3.5 percent per year maximum.

Mr. Schneiderman said preserved land was being used in other unintended ways as well, such as a backyard for a neighboring estate, “all hedged in, and hard to understand why the public would have supported that or funded that.” Once enhanced development rights are purchased, he said, “You can’t do the hedgerow and the lawn.”

Southampton was the first town in New York State to purchase enhanced restrictions on farmland, when, in 2014, under Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst, it bought the enhanced development rights on 33 acres, formerly the Danilevsky Farm, on Head of Pond Road in Water Mill for just over $11 million (the land trust had purchased it for just over $12 million). In turn, a third-generation farmer bought 19 of those acres for about $26,000 per acre. The acquisition approved Tuesday makes the third purchase of its kind (one other, in Noyac, did not involve the Peconic Land Trust).

East Hampton Town has yet to institute a similar program, though Mr. Halsey said there have been ongoing discussions with the town board. “I think we need to do some more education on the concept and the need,” he said, predicting that the North Fork would soon be faced with the same issue.

“It’s interesting that we’re going in this direction, but I think that it’s one we have to go in if we’re going to see the land maintained the way the original intent of the program was, so when we look out we see rows of cornfields or potatoes,” Mr. Schneiderman said.

He hopes this is the final solution. “I don’t want to, five years from now, have someone come back and say there are further enhanced rights. We want to get this over and done.”