Community Corner
Groups Want Pennsylvania Farm Tax Breaks Tied To Conservation Plans
Nearly 50 years ago, Pennsylvania began offering a 50% break on real estate taxes to farmers who enrolled in its Clean and Green program.
Jun 14, 2021
Nearly a half-century ago, Pennsylvania began offering a 50% break on real estate taxes to farmers who enrolled in its Clean and Green program aimed at keeping subdivisions and shopping centers from sprouting up on farm fields.
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But now, as the state struggles with meeting its pollution reduction goals for the Chesapeake Bay, some contend that too many of the 5.3 million acres of farmland enrolled in the tax break program statewide are not required to be particularly clean or green.
Participation in the Clean and Green program does not hinge on having basic state-mandated conservation plans designed to prevent soil erosion and stem the runoff of manure, fertilizer and other pollutants into local streams and ultimately the Bay.
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Having conservation plans for nearly all farms in Pennsylvania — any land that disturbs at least 5,000 square feet for agricultural products — has been state law for decades. But that requirement, until recently, has been often ignored except by the 5% of largest farms that fall under more strict regulations.
By failing to make the creation and implementation of conservation plans a condition of the widely used tax break program, many say the state has lost important leverage in getting a huge swath of farmland to follow rules aimed at reducing pollution.
“I think it’s fairly reasonable to say if you want to receive these tax benefits and be a good neighbor, that you should be a good steward of the natural resources we all share,” said Ezra Thrush of the environmental group PennFuture. The group is calling for the Clean and Green program to make conservation plans mandatory.
A state legislator has introduced a bill that would deny the tax breaks to landowners unless they have approved conservation plans.
“I just can’t imagine there is a program where somebody gets a tax break without meeting the standards of existing laws,” said state Rep. Mike Sturla, a Democrat from the city of Lancaster who has introduced the bill a handful of times. The previous bills have all died in the House Agriculture & Rural Affairs Committee without reaching a vote.
“I’m not trying to ‘get’ anybody,” said Sturla, who grew up among Lancaster County farmland. “This is the easiest thing we can do to relieve the pollution load flowing into the Bay. This is just helping people be good stewards.”
PA far behind schedule
To some, requiring Clean and Green participants to comply with environmental laws could be an important way to help reduce nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — entering the Bay from Pennsylvania.
The Keystone State is far off track to meet its nutrient reduction goals by the 2025 cleanup deadline. From 2010 through 2019, it reduced its annual nitrogen discharges by just 2.5%, from 113.2 million to 110.4 million pounds, according to computer model estimates from the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program.
By 2025, the state is supposed to cut that to 73.1 million pounds a year, and the vast majority of that must come from farmland. The state has not yet devised a plan showing how it would fully meet that goal or pay for needed actions. Its most recent plan identified an annual funding gap of $324 million a year.
That lack of progress spurred the states of Maryland, Virginia and Delaware, along with the District of Columbia and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, to file suit last year trying to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to prod more action from Pennsylvania.
Those who want to strengthen Clean and Green requirements include some legislators and environmental groups frustrated at the state’s inability to reach Bay commitments. Even other farmers who have dutifully created the conservation plans and made environmental improvements on their farms are resentful.
“Farming is so challenging,” said Matt Ehrhart of the Stroud Water Research Center. “It’s an incredibly hard job that’s more than full time and also marginally profitable in a lot of years. You can’t blame them for not wanting to add one more thing that might complicate an already complicated life.
“But we have great planners, lots of cost-sharing, and we have a 50-year-old requirement. There’s not a lot of patience for farmers who are saying, ‘I just don’t want to hurry up and comply with this law.’”
Ignored law
Under the Clean Streams Law, Pennsylvania has required erosion and sediment control plans since 1988 and manure-management plans since 1997. The plans typically cost $1,000–$2,000 for experts to prepare. Runoff-control practices often cost thousands more. But cost-sharing is usually available to cover all or a portion of the costs.
Many farmers, though, never created the plans. Others got plans but didn’t fully implement them. And there was little checking to see that they did.
In 2016, federal frustration over Pennsylvania’s unmet Bay-cleanup goals led the state Department of Environmental Protection to launch on-site inspections of the 33,000 farms in the Bay drainage area.
Those inspections — of 11,162 farms so far — found that 39% did not have manure-management plans and 38% did not have erosion and sediment control plans, despite warning letters sent out months ahead of the inspections. Based on those compliance rates and the numbers of farms left to check, there could be more than 8,000 additional farms, for a total of approximately 12,500 farms, that still do not have conservation plans in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Bay watershed.
But the results also show that many farmers with plans have not followed through on them. For example, some have not installed manure storage pits, stormwater runoff controls, barn downspouts, stream buffers, swales and other conservation measures required to stop polluted runoff.
Under a new phase of the state crackdown, inspectors will return to farmers a year after they filed plans to make sure they are implementing the on-the-ground steps that were part of the plans.
“This program has been viewed as leveling the playing field so farms who are not doing their part to protect the environment are held accountable and not tarnishing the reputation of the whole ag community,” said Christopher Thompson, head of Lancaster County’s conservation district.
Compliance unknown
While saying that many Lancaster County farmers have been leaders in conservation practices, Thompson supports the bill to require Clean and Green farmers to comply with the mandate for having and implementing conservation plans.
Lancaster County, which delivers more water-fouling nitrogen to the Chesapeake than any other county in the Bay watershed, has 362,619 ag acres in Clean and Green, the most in the state. The DEP farm-by-farm compliance inspections have led more than 1,000 farms to create conservation plans over the last two years.
No one knows precisely how many farms in the Clean and Green program don’t have conservation plans — those records are not kept. And even in the new, state-run crackdown on farmers without conservation plans, local conservation districts don’t keep statistics from the initial farm contacts.
“If we made a list, it would be subject to right-to-know and could be used by disgruntled neighbors, radical environmentalists, etc., to paint a disparaging picture of what is actually happening,” said one official involved with the inspections, who asked not to be named.
The state Department of Agriculture, which runs the Clean and Green program, has never examined how many participating farmers do not have conservation plans.
When Pennsylvania drew up its latest Watershed Implementation Plan to meet its Chesapeake Bay cleanup commitments, some state officials considered pushing Clean and Green reform as a top priority. In the end, the plan instead urges more cost-share money and education as incentives for compliance.
The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau has strongly opposed legislation to bar farmers from receiving tax breaks for failure to have conservation plans. Such an approach would be “punitive” and “counterproductive,” pushing more already-struggling farmers into selling to developers, said spokesman Liam Migdail.
Indeed, when Clean and Green was signed into law in 1974, it had a different priority. The goal was to keep farmers from being tempted to sell to developers. The program sought relief for farmers and owners of forested land so that they paid real estate taxes based on the actual use of the land rather than the land’s fair market value, which is constantly driven up by development pressure.
Clean and Green has been immensely popular, with roughly 10.8 million acres of forest and farmland enrolled. About 5.3 million acres of the state’s 7.3 million acres of farmland are in the program.
Even supporters of beefing up the Clean and Green requirements worry about the costs and personnel that would be needed to enforce the use of conservation plans. “You’re talking about a whole new army of inspectors here,” said Lamonte Garber of Stroud.
But Garber and Ehrhart said that if conservation plans had been enforced from the beginning, it would have resulted in major reductions to both impaired streams in Pennsylvania as well as soil and nutrient loadings in the Bay. If those plans were fully implemented, the state estimates they would achieve about 4.5 million pounds of the state’s nitrogen reductions annually.
“If, in fact, we had a robust compliance effort that was actually working across the board, then people might not be looking at other solutions to the problem,” Garber said. “Achieving widespread soil conservation planning and implementation is the single-most important tool, among many, to achieve our Chesapeake Bay requirements.”
When the DEP recently announced a major $5 million restoration of Hammer Creek, a wild trout stream in Lebanon County, it estimated that getting all 70 famers to comply with their conservation plans would achieve about 25% of pollution reduction goals.
Groups act on their own
While the state has not acted through Clean and Green, other groups are using compliance with conservation plans as a requirement to participate in their own programs.
Lancaster Farmland Trust, a private group that preserves mainly Plain Sect farms, started requiring in 2019 that farms have approved manure management plans before being considered for conservation easement purchases. Most Plain Sect farmers take advantage of the Clean and Green tax breaks.
“We just decided it was the right move to make sure the farms we preserve have those plans in place,” said Jeff Swinehart, chief operating officer. “First, for the stewardship of natural resources and second, to have plans followed because it’s state law.”
Similarly, the Lancaster County Preserve Board, which receives both state and county taxpayer funds for farm preservation, will this fall begin requiring proof of conservation plans in order to be considered for preservation funds, rather than just as a ranking tool.
“The ag preserve board, particularly farmer members, practice what they preach and believe it’s just the right thing to do, besides being a legal requirement,” said Matt Knepper, the board’s director. “They basically said, ‘If I can do it, so can you.’”
In a move some consider a model, Pennsylvania-based Turkey Hill Dairy is requiring all 160 of its milk suppliers in Pennsylvania and Maryland to have conservation plans and put in place such measures as barnyard stabilization, cover crops, manure storage and streamside buffers.
After all members are in compliance, they will be rewarded by being paid more for their milk.
What is ironic about the resistance by some farmers, Ehrhart said, is that conservation plans are valuable management tools that help make their farms more productive, profitable and sustainable.
Case in point is Raymond King, the latest of three generations to run a small farm in eastern Lancaster County. Though his father was an early pioneer in the conservation practice of no-till farming, the farm did not have a conservation plan when King took over in 1992.
King hauled manure year-round and was disturbed by the runoff he saw. He attended a public meeting on the Bay and went on a trip to see the estuary for himself. He came back realizing his water was affecting watermen far downstream — people working as hard as him to make a living.
Working with Stroud and the county conservation district, King added manure storage, streambank fencing and spouting on the barn. He also created a terrace in a field to shunt water away from a neighboring farm. It was all part of his new conservation plan.
“I guess we can’t ever be perfect, but we farmers can make a difference,” King said.
Cover photo: Farms are an integral part of the landscape in Narvon, PA. The young trees and shrubs in the foreground were planted as buffers for the small stream that flows into the Conestoga River. (Dave Harp)
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