Let the arguing begin:
"Up Close, Farms Annoy Some Seekers of Rural Life" by COREY KILGANNON
RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — Out where the Long Island Expressway and suburban sprawl fall away and the village of Riverhead opens onto the North Fork’s expanse of produce stands, farmhouses and acres of crops, a luxury-home development called the Highlands at Aquebogue has sprouted up on Sound Avenue.
The complex — surrounded by sod farms and rows of produce and situated across from a faded Long Island Cauliflower Association warehouse — offers expansive vistas that led Betsy Kennedy to pay $710,000 for her 3,500-square-foot three-bedroom house here.
“This is it,” Ms. Kennedy, a feng shui consultant, recalled thinking when she first gazed out the back windows at the fields of cauliflower, tomatoes and corn.
Then two months ago, booming began emanating from those fields — every seven minutes, all day long — from an air cannon used to scare birds from the corn.
As the North Fork — country cousin to the trendier peninsula to the south — has become an increasingly attractive place for those seeking the un-Hamptons, efforts to preserve farmland and maintain its rural character are bumping up against the constant creep of suburbanization.
Yet some of those city dwellers and suburbanites are not nearly as enamored of the less pleasant aspects of farms, like noisy machinery, animal smells, pesticides, dust from plowing, and zoning that lets homeowners keep barnyard animals.
More and more, those culture clashes are the subject of town hall meetings and political campaigns in Riverhead and Southold, with officials caught in the battle over supporting farmers’ livelihoods and other homeowners’ quality of life.
“There are so many developments cropping up next to farmland, I was curious if there was any town regulation about it,” said Ms. Kennedy, who said she ultimately decided against complaining to town officials here, and advised her neighbors not to complain to the farmer.
“You don’t want to get him mad enough to sell to a developer, so we wind up with a strip mall there,” she said. “A lot of people moved here because it has a rural feel without really being rural.”
Yuuuuuuuup, DON'T WANT a STRIP MALL!!!!!!
EASE UP on FARMER JOE, hunh, stinkshit asshole elitist pukes!!!!!!
Ms. Kennedy wound up staying inside her new house with the windows shut until the booming stopped, less than two weeks later.
Not everyone stifles the urge to complain.
In Southold, the town supervisor, Scott A. Russell, proposed a crackdown on animal noises from farms and from the homes of longtime residents taking advantage of agricultural zoning. (There were complaints about neighbors keeping horses and noisy peacocks in their yards.)
But many locals took the proposal as a nod to the new suburban settlers, and so, facing vicious opposition, the proposal died.
“There is increased friction between our agricultural traditions and elements of suburbanization,” said William P. Edwards, a Southold councilman on the town’s agricultural advisory committee. “We’re wrestling with what kind of town we really want to be. We’ll no longer be rural if we can’t preserve our open farmland, and the best way to do that is to let the farmers farm it.”
There are about 700 farms in Suffolk County — which leads the state in agricultural production, according to the New York State Farm Bureau — on about 34,000 acres of farmland. The bureau said the town of Southold, which covers most of the North Fork, has among the highest gross incomes in the state for farm products; the North Fork’s sandy soil and temperate conditions make it one of the most fertile areas in the region.
Yet there are the crosscurrents here. Summer residents want to maintain the local charm. Merchants know the farms help fuel the economy by drawing tourists. And longtime residents do not want any more traffic.
Nor are they comfortable with what happened in nearby Shoreham, where a developer bought a sod farm and a golf course in the hope of building 542 homes and 120,000 square feet of shops and offices.
Ha, ha, ha, yeah, give 'em a golf course instead! Ha-ha-ha!
At risk in Southold, Mr. Edwards said, is its 6,000 acres of developable farmland.
About 15,000 acres of farmland in the county have been preserved by government officials, and groups that advocate preserving open space have paid some farmers for development rights, then allowed them to keep their land to farm.
But one problem with this, farmers here say, is that some of this land around subdivisions is bought by developers for vistas, not farming, which makes farmland more scarce and raises the price of remaining farmable land.
George Bartunek, a Riverhead councilman who is active on agricultural issues, said the town was “trying to cluster housing with buffers of open space between the farmland and the communities.”
Farmers dismiss the complaints of new homeowners here, saying the things they dislike are part of rural living.
“People move out to farm country and want its benefits — the views, the charm — without realizing that farms make noise and create a degree of odor and dust,” said Joseph M. Gergela, executive director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, a lobbying organization. “This has become farming in suburbia, and farmers have to be good neighbors, but it isn’t Disneyland.”
It's known as LITERALLY BITING the HAND that FEEDS YOU!!!!
Paulette Satur, who with her husband owns Satur Farms, in Cutchogue, which grows salad greens, herbs and vegetables, said that real estate brokers should tell newcomers what living near a farm may involve.
“Someone buying in an agricultural district, it’s buyer beware,” said Ms. Satur, who is married to Eberhard Müller, a former chef at Le Bernardin and Lutèce in Manhattan. “But prior owners or Realtors should have a sheet of paper saying, ‘If you’re thinking of buying in an agricultural area, this what it entails.’”
Local farmland has become so expensive to buy or rent that more farmers are turning away from staples like potatoes and cauliflower and are growing more profitable crops like landscaping plants, sod and grapes for wine. Farming methods have also changed, bringing increased mechanization that is not as neighbor-friendly.
Farming is serving the elites! When does it ever end?
This has caused a problem for Satur Farms, which has six refrigerated produce trailers that spew fumes and rumble.
“It’s like living next to a fleet of tractor-trailers running all day and night,” said one resident, Libby Tarleton, 32. “It’s just continuous noise.” She said that in response to her complaint, the local authorities sent the state’s right-to-farm guidelines, which protect farmers from complaints.
There is a train that goes by the house every night.
After a while, you sleep right through it!
“Their response was basically, ‘It’s a farming area, get used to it,’” Ms. Tarleton said.
Ms. Satur dismissed the complaint similarly. “This is all part of living near a farm,” she said.
“We have a working farm and if anyone chooses to live near a farm — I mean, we are in the agricultural district, and everything we do is totally within the bounds of the agricultural zoning,” she said. “We try to be considerate, but we have tractors and trucks."
I say let us develop all the farmland so we got no eats!
Then let's hear the uppity-yuppies cry and whine!
Go get your hands into some fertilizers, shitters!
