J. Dixon Esseks

J. Dixon Esseks: His research helped justify ag protection

J. Dixon "Dick" Esseks

J. Dixon “Dick” Esseks was a pioneer researcher in farmland protection, conducting some of the first studies into the costs of sprawl and examining farmland preservation techniques that were on trial in the 1970s. Esseks has been a prolific author on farmland protection topics since becoming a professor at Northern Illinois University in 1968 where he first became interested in the fate of some of the world’s most productive soils in De Kalb County. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska where he is leading a new study of farmland preservation and farm viability programs. He also serves as research scholar for the American Farmland Trust’s Center for Agriculture in the Environment. FPR spoke with Esseks February 1, 2007.

FPR: Dick, before this interview I had to remind myself that you were one of the authors of the absolutely seminal National Agricultural Lands Study in 1981. Tell me how that study came about.
ESSEKS: Yes… Jim Jeffords, the U.S. Congressman from Vermont, before he became Senator … he and his chief aide, Bob Gray…

FPR: I interviewed Bob Gray in 1991. My copy of the NALS is from among his last copies…
ESSEKS: … the first time I met Bob – this is ’77 – he and Jeffords were very interested in farmland preservation. They had either sponsored such a program or they had certainly encouraged such a program in Vermont and they tried to get federal legislation and eventually it became the 1981 federal Farmland Protection Policy Act. They were pushing for rigorous federal involvement in the issue. This is a time, as you might remember, of high export demand and much concern, too, over the loss of farmland to urban development. And so Bob pushed, with Jefford’s help, for this legislation and due to a compromise that was agreed to by the Carter administration, they set up this national study to see whether in fact we did risk losing too much of our best land. It began in 1979 and went into the first months of the Reagan administration and it produced a nice set of documents, including The Protection of Farmland – A Reference Guidebook for State and Local Governments and that had chapters on the purchase of development rights, ag districts, and agricultural protection zoning and other issues. It was an early effort to evaluate these different tools.

FPR: Which chapter did you work most on?
ESSEKS: I did the ag district one with John Keene and the purchase of development rights one with Bob Coughlin. And what was really useful was that we had gone out and done research on a number of state and county programs, so we were able to base our findings on empirical realities.

FPR: That was important. It was so new.
ESSEKS: Yes. There wasn’t too much written before. I know that somebody – a planner in Blackhawk County, Iowa – wrote a publication that came out of the Soil and Water Conservation Society. So 30 years ago the scholarship had already begun and thanks to various people like Tom Daniels and thanks to you, the empirical research focus on this set of issues has been sustained.

FPR: What you are working on now?
ESSEKS: We have a grant, called a National Research Initiative Grant from USDA’s Cooperative State Research Education & Extension Service, we started in Fall ’04 and will finish in Fall ’07 … and its designed to look at how to sustain the viability of significant farming sectors in counties that are undergoing urbanization. We selected 15 counties (and in this we elected to follow the example of the NALS study) that is, to base our findings on actual public policy efforts, but this time not just to protect farmland but to protect also the other inputs for a viable ag sector and to put together policies supporting not just protecting land but opportunities and policies to promote successor farmers so that operations benefit from really good entrepreneurs. The assumption is, given the challenges of urbanization we need good entrepreneurs to create and sustain ag enterprises.

And here is where we are: we had three components to this study – a hopefully exhaustive study of ag census data, a survey of farmland owners in each county, and interviews with experts in each county. We’re trying to put them together to address four major questions. The first is, why bother to try to sustain agriculture in the face of urban pressure? That was the question thrown in our faces in 1979 to 1981 – why bother? Why not just let market conditions [prevail]? So that’s an important question. So this was addressed by the folks we interviewed and by land use plans and policy statements, and there are good arguments out there. The second question is, what marketing opportunities – wholesale and direct – and production inputs – land, labor and agri-support services, farm operator entrepreneurs – can be secured despite urban growth in the suburbs or exurbs. And are there successor farmers, the men and women who are willing to farm in the future. And that conceivably can be a real constraint. Thirdly, what type of farm or ranch is likely to succeed? And lastly, what public policies seem to help or hinder the goal of sustaining agriculture in these counties? As you know, there may be some cases where public policies are largely beside the point. It’s the work of the individual entrepreneurs that make all the difference. Elsewhere, I believe, in counties like Berks, Carroll and Burlington, so much effort has gone into protecting the land base, that it has made a big difference.

FPR: Then that begs the question, what comes first, strong ag or protection of the resource…
ESSEKS: One of the biggest issues we are looking at is whether the land that is protected through PDR stays in commercial farming… as opposed to a “tax” farm. We did a related study for NRCS in ’05-’06, where we interviewed over 400 owners of land protected in part by the FRPP.

FPR: Right. That was the study you outlined at the conference in Delaware.
ESSEKS: That study included a component on “second generation” owners, that is, the folks who acquired the protected farms from the owners who did the PDR agreement. The real fear is the land becomes an estate …farming is done just to the extent that they qualify for use value assessment. I did report to that group in Newark about what Burlington County is doing [with emergency fee simple purchases]. They are really serious about this. Susan Craft was a strong leader there, and now Dan Kennedy is ably running the program… they had an auction in 2006 and all seven properties went to farmers. That’s very encouraging. The farmers outbid the non-farmers.

FPR: You did some early work in the cost of community services…
ESSEKS: I started in De Kalb, Illinois. They were deliberately trying to protect agriculture there. The soils are outstanding… they used zoning, and very effectively. But they were looking for a variety of justifications for restrictive zoning policies. Because after all, they did say to farmers in De Kalb County, you can’t get your $4000-$5000 an acre whereas landowners across the border could… so we had to justify that. …We interviewed farmers who were farming next to rural subdivisions, looking at problems they encountered. It was something like 63 percent had really significant problems with their neighbors… we were able to document a series of negative effects on farming next to rural subdivisions.

FPR: You were probably first to do that…
ESSEKS: Well, Howard Conklin at Cornell had studied this. But ours was a relatively early study. Then later in the 90s with Ann Sorenson I got money to do a cost of services study. It was a little different from AFT’s, in that we surveyed the service costs of new rural homes and compared them to a separate sample of new homes within nearby cities, with the question, was it better to locate these homes [closer in]… We found it was the latter… that school busing costs and road maintenance costs and response times for emergency services were significantly better – that was supposed to be a second set of arguments, Deborah, you know – don’t build homes out in the rural areas where they conflict with farming, locate them in the cities because it’s also better from both the fiscal and public safety points of view. That helped us. It gave us an additional set of reasons for ag zoning.

FPR: And ultimately the courts agreed … well, I need to bring this to a close. Dick, what kind of books do you read when you are not doing research?
ESSEKS: I like the work of Nicholas Sparks. He wrote The Notebook and Message in a Bottle…