In Yolo, Farmland Is Hallowed Ground

Peter Hunter was only 9 when his father planted his first Yolo County prune orchard and assured him the trees would be his some day. Now, Hunter, 53, takes his own two sons to a new prune orchard and tells them they can tend the family farm forever, if they want.

“I laugh because [9-year-old] Tadden isn’t particularly interested. He has visions of being a commando,” Hunter said recently as a warm delta breeze fanned his hilltop farmhouse 30 miles west of Sacramento. “But Toby’s a little bit younger, and he likes the land out here. He may be the next farmer.”

Hunter, who uses a PhD in computer science to subsidize his “farming habit,” might have been rich by now had he welcomed expansion of this historic farm town and allowed housing subdivisions to push west onto his land at the foot of the Vaca Mountains.

Instead, a decade ago, Hunter joined a corps of farmers, politicians, academicians and bureaucrats in a countywide effort to hold the line against urban development.

Then, in 2000, Hunter sold the development rights on most of his farm to a land trust for enough money to plant a new orchard, forsaking a well-worn path by farmers who make more by selling at market rates to developers.

“In Southern California, today’s farmer is tomorrow’s developer,” said John Bencomo, Yolo County’s planning director and a Los Angeles native. “Here, we have characters like the Hunters. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a belief system. It’s not about money.”

Yolo County was settled by farmers about 150 years ago and has remained primarily a patchwork of flat cropland lined on the west by a ridge of rolling, oak-studded hills.

Located northwest of Sacramento, the 181,000-resident county faces enormous pressure to grow, because Capitol commuters can get to work from there in minutes on two interstate freeways by crossing the Sacramento River. It’s just 12 miles on I-80 from Davis, the largest city in the county, to downtown Sacramento.

But as much as any California county, Yolo has embraced the philosophy that urban expansion should occur only on marginal lands and that prime planting ground should be saved for future generations of farmers. Under local laws, if developers build on an acre of farmland, they must protect another acre of equal agricultural value forever -- a unique requirement among California counties.

“Yolo County has stood fast and firm in the face of this incredible regional growth pressure,” said John McCaull, regional director of the American Farmland Trust in California. “They have the strongest farmland protection ordinance in the state.”

Planner Bencomo describes county rules and regulations that protect farmland -- encased in three blue binders, each three inches thick -- as a “collage of tools” that fashions growth, but does not stop it. Indeed, Yolo County was the state’s 17th fastest-growing county in the 1990s with a population increase of about 28,000, or nearly 20%.

During the previous 30 years, Yolo County -- in the path of growth from Sacramento and the Bay Area -- had seen its population explode.

“We realized we’d doubled in size, and asked what are we going to look like in 20 more years,” recalled county Supervisor Helen Thomson. “That was when the cities and the Farm Bureau and the Chamber of Commerce all came together and discovered that we had a consensus about what we wanted for the future. And it has really all come about.”

Now, when developers bring projects to Yolo County’s Board of Supervisors, they not only must save an acre of farmland for every acre they pave over, they have to pay hefty special fees for an array of county services their projects will require. The same acre-for-acre requirement is in place in working-class Woodland, the seat of county government. And in upscale Davis, the leafy home to a University of California campus, city officials have upped the ante even more, requiring the donation of development rights on two acres of farmland for every acre used by builders.

So as subdivisions and ranchettes serving Sacramento push onto rich delta soil, the nonprofit Yolo Land Trust is buying or has acquired nearly 15,000 acres of grazing land and nearly 5,000 acres of cropland -- far more than what is protected in any other county in the 400-mile-long Central Valley.

Yolo’s cities have taken another unusual step. The municipalities of Davis, Woodland, West Sacramento and Winters all share sales- or property-tax revenues with the county so supervisors are under less pressure to approve new developments in unincorporated areas to capture tax dollars.

The county has also joined its cities in creating three huge farmland buffer zones -- each several miles long and totaling about 45,000 acres -- meant to separate the communities from each other with fields of golden grain, green corn stalks, red tomatoes and shady walnut orchards. Two of the three zones are new, and awaiting formal ratification.

Yolo County has enforced for years a “right to farm” policy that warns new homeowners in their real estate deeds that they’re living next to farms and that noise, odor and dust come with the territory.

Local officials also joined a state and federal effort to restore 16,000 acres of ponds and grasslands in the Yolo Bypass floodway for hundreds of species of birds that nest or migrate along the Pacific Flyway. Local governments are creating wildlife preserves, and developers are now required to donate land for wildlife habitat.

Even the county’s tourism policy is shaped by its agrarian past. It promotes its vineyards, wineries, roadside vegetable stands and quaint bed-and-breakfasts.

But preserving rural heritage comes at a cost.

Local officials have been criticized for contributing to the rising cost of housing. In Davis, a typical home now sells for about $390,000, more than double its $180,000 median price in 1995, reports DataQuick Information Systems.

Last year, Yolo County ranked as the 21st-least affordable urban area among 190 in the United States, while Sacramento ranked 25th, according to the National Assn. of Homebuilders.

“It’s outrageous that they have policies that work against the state’s ability to meet its housing needs,” said Tim Coyle, spokesman for the California Building Industry Assn. “There’s a direct cost of limiting land supply that ends up on the sticker of a single-family home or rental apartment. To ask a homebuilder or home buyer to subsidize a farmer, makes absolutely no sense. It’s wrong and it’s un-American.”

Some local farmers are also critical of Yolo County’s efforts, but for different reasons. They complain that local officials are not doing enough to control population growth.

“The Yolo County’s General Plan sounds like farmland preservation is one of their goals, and they’ve done some things better than other counties,” said fifth-generation farmer Charlie Rominger, 49, chairman of the county Farm Bureau’s land-use committee.

“But the growth rates here are about the same as in other counties,” he said. “The city of Winters has tripled in size [to 6,600] since I finished high school in 1972.”

In fact, as Yolo County’s population has doubled since 1970, the number of residents in each of its cities has about tripled. That shows growth has been concentrated in cities, as called for by county policy.

But Rominger said city boundaries are always expanding, and he ticked off projects he has opposed through the years that were built on prime farmland.

“There’s always a reason,” he said.

And the push to urbanize is constant, say county officials and preservationists. Speculators are taking advantage of a struggling farm industry to buy up Yolo County farmland faster than ever, said Kathryn Kelly, executive director of the Yolo Land Trust.

“Developers typically purchase property five to 15 years in advance,” she said. “They’re land banking.”

For now, however, Yolo County moves in virtual lock step to protect farmland for future generations.

Peter Hunter, his biologist wife, Debbie, and their two boys are on the front lines. They’ve got another orchard to replant once they decide which crop is most likely to make them a little money, or lose the least.

But they can already see a housing subdivision just across Dry Creek half a mile away.

“We’re feeling a little closed in these days,” Peter Hunter said. “But we want to stay. I tell my wife, when I die, to just sweep me out the back door. My dad’s buried out there.”