SALISBURY — Members of the Rowan County Agricultural Advisory Board appeared before the Rowan County Board of Commissioners during its annual planning retreat on Monday, asking the county to implement a farmland preservation fund.

The fund would come from the penalties prescribed to properties that are removed from the North Carolina Present-Use Valuation Program, which provides tax breaks to active farmland, horticultural land or forest. If a property is removed from the program, typically because it is being developed, then the state and county are able to clawback the past three years of deferred taxes. Ben Knox, a member of the AAB and chairman of the Rowan County Soil and Water Conservation District, asked the commissioners to put that extra funding into a preservation fund.

Currently, the commissioners utilize the funding, which totaled approximately $790,000 for the past five years, at their discretion.

“This is property that was in farming that’s coming out of farming, and those are tax dollars that are surprise tax dollars for the county because we don’t know when that property will come out of present-use value. So, the ag community feels like those are agricultural dollars that we would like to see go back into the agricultural community as incentives to keep land in agriculture and in open space,” said Amy-Lynn Albertson, Rowan County Extension director.

Knox said that the funding would be put into a preservation fund maintained by the county that could then be used to assist farmland owners with the costs associated with implementing conservation easements, including surveying the land, appraising the property and having an environmental study performed.

“This is community action, this comes from the stakeholders in the county. We’ve got a lot of folks that are highly interested in preserving farmland. What happens is, the older generation passes and the next generation, they’re not involved in farming and they see the chance to make some money,” said Knox, who added that both the AAB and the Soil and Water Conservation District board of supervisors passed resolutions supporting the implementation of the fund.

Knox provided statistics showing the large loss of farmland in both Rowan County and the nation as a whole. Between the 2017 and the 2022 censuses, the county dropped from approximately 118,000 acres of farmland to approximately 105,000. He added that a study performed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that if Rowan County continued down its current pathway, then it would lose another quarter of its farmland by 2040.

Vice-Chairman Jim Greene voiced his support for the farmland preservation efforts, adding that farmland owners will be under even more pressure to develop because of President Donald Trump’s desire to bring industries back into the country that had left. Destruction of the nation’s farmland would make the nation more reliant on importing food from other nations.

No action was officially taken by the commissioners on Monday, and the implementation of the preservation fund, if approved, would likely come during the budget approval process in July.

The meeting on Monday was the first event to be held in the newly-renovated Rowan Community Center event space. The RCC, formerly the West End Plaza, has multiple conference rooms, a gallery and an outdoor amphitheater that can all be rented.

More information from the planning retreat, including the commissioners’ discussion on next year’s budgets, plans for the vacant space in the Rowan Community Center and plans to implement a Unified Development Ordinance, will be forthcoming in a future edition of the Salisbury Post.