Foxbard Farm – Sound Clips

John Payne:

Audio One

He was going to put up a great big trophy house. Had a gazebo planned, swimming pool, a fancy barn for his sheep and a variety of other trappings. We went around and talked to a lot of neighbors, and they got excited about it and felt that they wanted the town to exercise its right of first refusal under 61A. The land trust came in with some creative financing ideas, and was willing to be the key focus point for all of the efforts. We had a huge town meeting, with more people than I’ve ever seen at the town hall with a lot of strong opinions expressed. And probably 85-90% of the opinions expressed were let’s keep the land open rather than be developed. Rather than adding another house. Rather than adding this particular kind of house that’s got nothing to do with the rural area of Shelburne.

Audio Two

It was just way beyond anything I could afford, and just way beyond the ag. value of the land. And she said well I know it’s not the ag value but I’m selling it for the highest and best use, and that happens to be house lots. And I think I can get that price. And I said, well good luck to you. And she got that price and that’s when the whole thing started.

Audio Three

But Shelburne is a town that people care a whole lot about the community and about what’s happening in the community. …It’s a very active community in terms of caring about the community and keeping it a rural community. And so when I started visiting, and other people who cared started visiting with neighbors, saying would you be willing to support this and would you be willing to come to a town meeting, they all said, yeah. What do you need. Let us know. And when we got to the town meeting, I was prepared to get up and give a long speech about why we should support giving the land trust the right of first refusal, but I was just floored because neighbor after neighbor after neighbor got up and each one making sort of a different point, talked about why it was important to keep this as a farm and keep this undeveloped. And it was everything from watershed and water quality issues to lifestyle to not having another building here to caring about the woods. I mean, people went on and on. It was very much a very community action versus one or two people brow beating the rest. It was easy to get people excited about protecting the property.

Audio Four

The most credit goes to FLT and Mark Zenick, because Mark had seen these situations many times in the past….And I think he’s succeeded in protecting over a 1000 acres in Shelburne and over 10,000 acres in Franklin County. And when I went to him and talked to him, he had just a whole host of ideas. And he said the key is to find out where you can get support and how eager neighbors are and also what the Selectman and town officials are prepared to do. We weren’t doing it for the first time. He showed us what to do. So, Mark gets a lot of credit.

Audio Five

The land trust is not in the business of managing land, and in fact we’re not in the business of managing land. And he said, would you be willing to take on the management responsibility. And because it’s contiguous with us and it fits in particularly with our forestry operation and I wanted to expand the Angus herd and I didn’t have enough pasture, it was a natural fit for us. So I said sure, I’d love to do that.

Audio Six

That’s a very important point for people to understand about open space—that keeping it open is cheaper than putting buildings on it from a tax perspective.

Audio Seven

The forest has been mostly highgraded, in other words all the good stuff taken off. All the junk left behind. And what really needs to happen is we need to spend probably 3 winters in the woods weeding out all the poor stuff and then wait 10 years for the good stuff to grow to a size, or maybe 20 or 30 years, till the good stuff grows to a size where it’s marketable. Our basic strategy around all of our woodlots, we have 4 woodlots that we effectively manage, is an uneven aged forest. So we try to have, just what it sounds like, young stuff, middle aged and mature stuff ready for harvest. And we tend to create openings in the canopy so that new young stuff can grow up as part of our harvesting program.

Audio Eight

* I have a responsibility to maintain the land in a positive productive manner that is consistent with the best way the land could be used from an agricultural perspective. So, for instance, I’m going to put in a 10-year plan to manage the forests. And you can see that we’ve already improved the pastures and we’ve already made improvements to one of the hayfields, and we’ll work on the other one in due course. So it’s a 2-way street. I get to use it, but I have to use it in an agriculturally responsible manner.

Audio Nine

When we first started talking about it, the number was so large and it was way beyond anything I could afford or really could justify to keep that space open. Something that I could justify for our own farming operation. But we went ahead and talked to neighbors, and with all the help from the land trust with how to put the pieces together, and with all the enthusiasm, the parts began to work. And we began to figure out how we could come up with enough money and in the end we did. It was not anywhere as tough as I thought it was going to be when we started. I still think it was too much money, but everyone pitched in and we got it done. So it was really a great success.