The road to Frog Hollow Farm in Brentwood travels northern California’s Highway 4, a hot and dusty corridor that was once lined with jeweled fields of cherries, peaches and apricots. Roughly 50 miles east of San Francisco on the Sacramento River Delta, this agricultural region is well-known known for its stone fruit and corn. As with most places in the U.S., the landscape here has vastly changed in the past 30 years. Where once farmland reigned, endless rows of strip malls, big box stores, and tracts homes have sprouted, all to support a population explosion.

According to the Brentwood Agricultural Land Trust (BALT)—which preserves productive agricultural land through farmland conservation and promotes local farming through the Community Alliance with Family Farmers’ Buy Fresh Buy Local regional marketing campaign—the region includes more than 12,000 acres of contiguous, prime, irrigated farmland. The California Department of Conservation (CDC) has ranked the soils in East Country Costa (where Brentwood sits) as having the highest quality and yields per acre of farmland are among the highest in the state. With such incredible soil and yields, farmers produce agricultural products valued at more than $100 million a year and contribute more than $300 million to the county’s annual economy.

But something happened in Brentwood that reflects a disturbing national trend: rapid urban development and new suburban communities sprawling out over prime farmland. In 2002, Brentwood was one of the fastest growing cities in California; the city’s population grew from 7,500 in 1990 to over 50,000 in 2005. According to the CDC between 1984 and 2004, almost 20,000 acres of county agricultural land, including 9,100 acres of farmland, were converted to urban uses. Between 1997 and 2000, the county lost 4,381 acres of agriculture land and ranked fourth among counties in California in the loss to urban use.

BALT’s Executive Director, Kathryn Lyddan, says Brentwood grew houses, not jobs, and failed to develop any significant industry. As the population moved in, they were willing to commute ever far distances to jobs outside of the city. “Brentwood is the poster child of what is not sustainable, both economically and socially,” says Lyddan. “Without real political commitment, there is a lack of support to protect the very land which makes this region so special.”

In 2002, in response to pressure from the environmental community, Brentwood adopted an agricultural mitigation program which requires developers who convert agricultural land to urban use to pay $5,500 an acre into a fund to be used to conserve farmland.  Brentwood has since collected over $12 million of agricultural mitigation funds, which are held and controlled by the city.  BALT was created and funded out of the mitigation fund to implement the program and developed independent, pro-active land conservation, as well as a grant funded agricultural marketing program.  In November 2005, Brentwood placed a developer-funded initiative on the ballot asking the voters to move the urban limit line to allow additional development on the valuable farmland to the east of Brentwood. The initiative, which was actively supported by city, was narrowly defeated by only 148 votes. Then, in 2007, Brentwood stopped funding BALT.

Now that the economy has been devastated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, rising fuel prices and resulting economic downturn, home values in Brentwood have dropped by 50 percent. According to BALT, Brentwood has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the Bay Area.  The only silver lining of the failing economy is the reduced development pressure, which, according to Lyddan, provides significant opportunities to preserve agricultural land and build momentum for agricultural preservation.

Lyddan’s work supports farms like Frog Hollow, 133 organic acres of Eden in the middle of Brentwood’s sprawl. Run by farmer Al Courchesne, and his wife and business partner, pastry chef Rebecca, the farm is a prime example of the importance of preserving land and connecting to community through food. Farmer Al, who planted his first peach orchard in 1976, now grows 25 varieties of peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries, pluots, table grapes, plums, pears, as well as olives. The farm has a 400-member weekly CSA and runs a wildly popular urban farm stand at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Marketplace, where they sell their fruit, along side Rebecca’s outstanding sweet and savory pastries, as well as a Frog Hollow line of conserves, chutneys and marmalades.

Lyddan points out that farms like Frog Hollow and others create the components of a local food system: an extraordinary producing area that’s close to Bay Area populations and institutional purchasers seeking local food. What’s missing, she says, is a source-identified distribution system which would tell the story of Brentwood farmers to consumers, especially as more urbanites search for local connections to their food.  Doing so, says Lyddan, would provide Brentwood farmers with new markets that could offer economic advantages over wholesale markets, provide urban residents with fresh, healthy food, and reduce food miles and while keeping food dollars in the community.

BALT is working hard to create these connections, while continuing is efforts to preserve family farms and fertile soils. Without BALT, vital farmland in East Contra Costa will continue to disappear. You can support their important work by becoming a member and/or volunteering. In addition, join BALT for their fifth annual harvest celebration September 20 at Taylor Ranch.

The US Green Building Council’s draft LEED* for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) rating system would allow subdivisions built on prime farmland to qualify for the organization’s green seal of approval. At a time when farmland is converted to subdivisions and shopping malls at a rate of two acres a minute, this is a major step in the wrong direction. Indeed, communities throughout the nation are looking for ways to revitalize their foodsheds and grow more food locally. We should be doing everything possible to preserve prime farmland, instead of greenwashing projects that pave over it.

Prime farmland is the land best suited for growing agricultural crops with minimal inputs of fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides and without causing soil erosion. Crops can be grown on lower quality land, but with more petrochemical inputs for the same bushels of output. Keeping prime farmland in farming, particularly in urbanizing counties, is a key strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, cutting pesticide use, and limiting our dependence on distant food sources. Once this land is divided into parcels, paved, built over, and sliced up by roads and other infrastructure, it is lost forever.

The proposed LEED-ND standard, currently open for public comment until June 14, would allow developers to get LEED status even if the project is built on prime farmland, provided that they purchase easements protecting land with comparable soils. The calculations for mitigation are a bit complex, but in urbanized areas, sprawling projects with residential density less than or equal to 8.5 dwelling units per acre of buildable land have to protect twice as much farmland as they destroy. But the required mitigation drops as the density of the project increases. Projects with residential density between 11.5 and 13 dwelling units per acre must set aside at least 50% of the acreage destroyed. Those projects at a density of more than 13 dwellings per acre have no mitigation requirement at all. In projects located in rural areas, the mitigation requirements are even less stringent.

If adopted as-is, the LEED-ND certification will falsely brand as “sustainable” many projects that squander precious, non-renewable, fertile soils. Given the challenges of climate change, water shortages, and declining soil productivity, coupled with an increasing population, it is essential to preserve prime farmland for future food production near our towns and cities. If advocates are successful in their efforts to shift agricultural subsidies from large commodity growers to small- and mid-size sustainable farms, this farmland will be increasingly profitable to farm, and will form the backbone of a revived, diversified agricultural sector.

No doubt, the USGBC is concerned that a prerequisite precluding development on prime farmland would reduce the pool of applicants for the LEED-ND certification, including projects that have other beneficial green attributes. Some may believe that allowing LEED projects on prime farmland would encourage developers to build subdivisions with small built-in farms, like the well-known Prairie Crossing, and that these farmland subdivisions would mitigate the overall loss of farm acreage. Others may feel that prime farmland is simply not important enough to worry about, or is impossible to keep in farming given the current dominance of large-scale, global agribusiness.

But there is nothing sustainable about a project that diminishes our finite stock of fertile soil. Providing guidelines that encourage developers to build more compactly does not make it right to build a compact development on prime farmland any more than it justifies filling in wetlands, cutting intact forest landscapes, or paving over critical habitat for a project. And protecting an equivalent amount of land somewhere else, or installing solar collectors, greywater recycling systems, or other environmental technologies does not offset the permanent loss of this land.

Moreover, there is plenty of land to build great new neighborhoods in existing communities or on sites with marginal soils not suited to growing food, feed, or fiber located adjacent to towns and cities. Those are types of projects that deserve LEED-ND recognition. Prime farmland, a finite resource, should be the last place anyone builds, and those developers who choose to destroy prime farmland should not be given the honor of being called leaders in energy and environmental design.

To submit comment on the LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating System, see the US Green Building Council’s website. The USGBC comments process requires choosing a section to comment on. For this topic, choose “Smart Location and Linkage (SSL) Prerequisite 4: Agricultural Land Conservation.”

*Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

Photo: ketalady, compost information at new homes in Prairie Crossing