Oregon’s agricultural lands face off with the state’s growing urban population

Photo by Jeff Sigmund, IowaWatch

By Valerie Brown. March 12, 2020. Contrasts between urban and rural life have been around since Aesop’s fable of the country mouse and the city mouse. But in the rapidly-changing state of Oregon, these contrasts are turning into conflict as urban areas expand and agricultural areas find themselves colonized by both low-density housing — big houses on big lots, sometimes called “trophy houses” — and higher-density subdivisions.

Fourth-generation pear grower Erick von Lubken has grown accustomed to this urban-rural friction on his family’s orchard south of Hood River. In 1988, a neighboring property owner sold its land to a developer for a golf course. Von Lubken’s family objected all the way through a Land Use Board of Appeals proceeding. (Although they failed to block the golf course, their case did establish a subsequent precedent for keeping golf courses off high-value farmland.)

Now, von Lubcken says wryly, “I farm surrounded by a golf course along with two extremely busy roads that run next to a high school.”

Meanwhile, roughly 100 miles south of von Lubken’s orchard, Mickey Killingsworth raises sheep on 20 acres outside of Madras. “My north border is a subdivision,” she says. “I can tell you horror story after horror story.”

Killingsworth’s problems with the subdivision mostly involve problems with dogs — either residents’ dogs go after her lambs or someone complains about her dogs barking randomly, which she says that, as working dogs, they don’t actually do.

It’s this naïveté of urbanites about the realities of agriculture that Killingsworth finds most frustrating. And this is a common point of contention in a state where the line between urban and rural communities is either shrinking, shifting or disappearing altogether.

Many people who move to the urban-rural interface “may want to build a nice house in the orchards because it’s beautiful,” says Mike Omeg, whose family grows Bing cherries south of The Dalles. However, he adds that they typically aren’t prepared for “those agricultural activities like mowing and kicking up dust, or the noise of a harvest crew next door to you at five in the morning picking.”

Urban Density

Like it or not, low-density housing and urban sprawl are a fait accompli, especially in areas surrounding large cities and regions of high recreational value — places like central Oregon, the Gorge and the Wallowas.

For Sale signs offering subdivided pieces of farmland are becoming increasingly common throughout the state, especially in areas with high recreational value like Wallowa County. Photo courtesy of NRCS Oregon

But Jim Johnson, land use and water planning coordinator for the Oregon Department of Agriculture, says that while things may seem dire in Oregon, “Washington has a much greater problem and Idaho is a joke.”

In this sense, some regulation is better than none, and Oregon has protected farmland since the 1962 establishment of the “essential farm use” policy. That policy has been eroded by exceptions, which grew from the original five to about 60 now. (Examples include exceptions made for quarries, wineries, private airports and campgrounds.)

Further regulation arrived in the 1970s with the establishment of the Land Conservation Development Commission and the Land Use Board of Appeals. The legislation created the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) policy, which was designed to prevent urban sprawl. The program has dramatically slowed the loss of farmland, but it has by no means stopped it.

Data shows that Oregon’s population has gone from 2.2 million in 1974 to almost 4 million today (with another 1.2 million expected by around 2050). And in that same period of time, the state has lost half a million acres of prime farmland.

This population growth puts pressure on housing costs. According to the nonprofit 1000 Friends of Oregon, there is a housing shortfall of 155,000 homes in Oregon — and the demand for affordable housing is only expected to increase in the future. Expansion has to go out or up, but until HR2001 became law last year, zoning codes prevented multi-family dwellings in single-family developments. The change should help keep cities inside their UGBs.

Complicating matters further is the fact that land use in Oregon is governed by state laws, but is administered at the city and county levels. And while farmers want their land to be protected, many resent government intrusion. Measure 37, passed by voters in 2004, gave property owners a right to compensation for lost value caused by regulation, but the program was not funded. In 2007 voters approved Measure 49, which stipulated compensation in the form of buildable home sites on land outside UGBs. This triggered a spate of 5000 new home sites, mostly near Portland and Bend.

Squeezed from all sides

While city dwellers wrestle with increased density and skyrocketing home prices, farmers face other pressures. According to Oregon State University, in 1985, it took gross sales of about $80,000 to support a family on a farm. In 2005, it took $250,000.

So in order to stay in business, farmers have needed to acquire ever more land. Many end up with several small parcels rather than one big piece of land. Johnson explains that in the Willamette Valley, some farmers may be working 200 acres chopped into as many as 20 small plots. This is incredibly inefficient.

Satellite imagery shows the Urban Growth Boundary near Beaverton, Oregon.

A second source of anxiety is the graying of the farming population. According to the Center for Small Farms and Community Food Systems at Oregon State University, the average age of farmers in Oregon is 60, and as Baby Boom farmers retire they will be transferring nearly two-thirds of Oregon’s farmland to someone else. Many retiring farmers would like to pass their land on to their children, but this is a fraught process. If the farmer dies without securing the succession, the heirs may end up paying extra estate taxes and may have to sell the farm even if they don’t want to.

To add insult to injury, residential development pushes up the price of land, so that “it’s impossible for a lot of people to buy farmland if they actually are farmers, or to continue to farm if they’re in farm families and one sibling has to buy another one out,” says Parkdale pear grower Mike McCarthy, who also serves as president of the board for 1000 Friends of Oregon.

“Bill Gates will buy [the land] to ride a horse on,” he says.

Is help on the way?

Resources to help farmers with these pressures are increasing. Nellie McAdams, a third–generation hazelnut farmer near Gaston (west of Portland), says, “One of the questions is how to match people without a successor to people who have the skills but not an inheritance.” Oregon FarmLink connects these two groups. McAdams has started a statewide land trust program to develop agricultural easements, similar to conservation easements, that can be incorporated into financing for a farm sale. The Oregon Agricultural Heritage Program awards grants to watershed councils and nonprofits to develop conservation easements that will enhance environmental values such as water quality and wildlife habitat in agricultural lands. The Oregon State University Extension Service’s Ties to the Land program provides information and support for succession planning. In Washington, the PCC Farmland Trust works to preserve agricultural land. One method is to buy at-risk land, establish conservation easements and then sell or lease the land to a farmer.

Agriculture is not just another industry. It is necessary to support life as we know it. And the pressures placed on farmers by urban- and suburbanites will continue for the foreseeable future as the Earth’s human population (and the subsequent demand for both food and housing) grows. In the long run, a lighter environmental footprint on all sides may be the only thing that enables the country mouse and the city mouse to get along.