Trouble Ahead For The Family Farm!

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Our future doesn't have to be dismal, and a group that's pointing the way for family farms-and providing a model that shows how pleasant and productive the years to come can be-is responsible for . . .

Shelburne Farms: The Greening of a White Elephant

Shelburne Farms—which occupies some 1,700 rolling acres on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain—is hardly a typical family farm operation ... even though it has been owned by the same family for nearly 100 years. Shelburne began, you see, as a rich man's agricultural estate ... an experimental farm put together by a person with enough time, money, and drive to seek agricultural perfection.

The land-use design for the property was done by Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect of New York's Central Park . . . and owner William Seward Webb planted forests, raised livestock, grew field crops, and installed orchards. The enterprise flourished. By 1890, Shelburne Farms harvested rye, oats, and wheat . . . sold butter, milk, eggs, and apples to the New York markets . . . and had under construction greenhouses, dairy barns, and sheep and poultry pens.

Over the course of the next 70 years, Shelburne Farms always paid its own way . . . the small profit turned in during some years served to cancel out the minor losses incurred in others. By the 1960's, however, the agricultural estate began to look like a "white elephant" property. Taxes had risen and were continuing to rise, and the expansion of the nearby city of Burlington was rapidly driving up the price of land . . . which added to the tax burden.

When Shelburne's annual tax bill climbed to $50,000, Derick Webb—the farm's present owner—called a family meeting. He explained the economics of the situation . . . and then asked his children what they wanted to do with their inheritance. Unanimously, they chose to resist the easy money that could be had by developing the property for homesites. The family members all felt that their historic homestead was too valuable an agricultural, historic, and environmental resource to sell off piecemeal.

So in 1972—with money provided by the sale of an adjacent piece of land to the Nature Conservancy- ''Shelburne Farms Resources" was organized as a non-profit educational corporation. The goal of SFR is to develop an integrated use of the farm's assets . . . employing the property to teach land management techniques, to experiment with new crops for the Northeast, and to apply primarily wholistic methods to relatively large-scale farming. The Webb family believed that Shelburne Farms could function as a magnet, attracting attention—because of its history, its architectural excellence, and its beauty—to innovative farm ideas.

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