Glen Ridge Farm in Portsmouth has garnered attention for breeding alpacas, a South American species related to the llama. But in the eyes of developers, the property holds much more potential value than the rare animals.
The pressure to sell the land is tremendous, said Ann Fiore, who runs the farm with her fiancé, Kevin Tarsagian. In some cases, she said, people have literally walked onto the farm with an open checkbook or left a blank check on the door.
“We don’t even look at them,” she said. “We rip them up.”
It’s a situation that plays itself frequently in the state, said Kenneth Ayars, chief of the R.I. Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Agriculture.
“The development pressure in this state is extreme,” he said. “I visit farms all the time, and there are very few that can’t show me a recent offer from a developer for more money than they’ll typically ever see in a lifetime.”
Rhode Island now has the most valuable farmland in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: $11,200 per acre last year. And property values are rising fast, 9.8 percent just from 2004 to 2005, the most rapid growth rate in New England.
Scott Wolf, executive director of Grow Smart Rhode Island, said farms are particularly valuable here because they’re close to cities such as Providence and Newport – not isolated, as in most other states. With much of the state built out, Wolf added, land is also at a premium.
“If we want to preserve agriculture in the state, we need to work on [purchasing] development rights to enable farmers to continue their work as opposed to selling their land,” Wolf said.
The DEM has been doing that, slowly, for 20 years. So far, it has forged agreements with 68 farms barring the owners from selling to developers. The properties range from five-acre lots in Little Compton to 223-acre farms in Coventry, all permanently removed from the market.
Farm owners who do sell, however, can get big money. Rick Grosvenor, co-owner of Prudential Prime Properties in Newport, said he’s seen the prices of unbuilt lots that once sold for less than $100,000 jump to $300,000.
Michele Caprio, president of the R.I. Association of Realtors and a native of South Kingstown, said she’s seen more and more people move into Washington and Kent counties in the last decade, building up former farmland.
“It’s not really new people coming into the state,” she said. “It’s people within the state moving down to South County, western Cranston and western Coventry because they want to have larger lots.”
But Caprio, who credits the rise in rural land value to the increase in housing prices statewide, said the response from communities has further pushed up prices. Large-lot zoning and other limitations make it necessary to buy up more land and charge more for houses.
“It’s more feasible for a developer to come in and do a higher density development and get more lots to sell more homes,” she said.
Rising property values hurt farmers and can stifle the expansion of existing farms, Ayars said. “The unfortunate consequence of that is that value of farmland is extreme,” making it difficult for farmers to purchase land in the state.
At the same time, Wolf said, the high cost of farmland reflects, to some extent, the success of the farms themselves. “The agricultural sector is a high-valued sector of our economy,” he said. It “not only has economic benefits for the state,” he added, “but also environmental, quality of life and tourism benefits.”
To keep farms strong, Ayars’ office and the nonprofit Farm Fresh Rhode Island, among others, have developed programs to bring local farms’ products directly to consumers and develop “agritourism.” One successful effort has been the Rhody Fresh dairy collaborative, which now sells milk statewide.
Breeding alpacas is Tarsagian and Fiore’s way of keeping their farm viable. When Tarsagian bought Glen Ridge in the late 1990s, it had already been approved for a six-lot subdivision, Fiore said. Tarsagian, who’d dreamed of owning a farm, kept the property as it was.
For now, the land and the historic buildings on it are protected, but Fiore and Tarsagian do worry about the future.
“We didn’t work this hard on this land to die and have someone develop it,” Fiore said.
