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Farmers in the zone
County to start agricultural district
Alan Rogers
Durane Hood raises chickens for Case Farms on his property in Vale, along with cattle and hay. Hood said he thinks the voluntary agriculture district program adopted by the Catawba County Board of Commissioners in October will benefit farmers in the county.
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Published: November 2, 2008
NEWTON - In an effort to be good neighbors, Catawba County is creating a voluntary agricultural district.
"Everybody talks about how much they enjoy driving through the countryside. There's beautiful pastures with cows and horses," said Mary George, senior planner with the county. "But there are certain negatives to living near a working farm."
Slow traffic is one example. Durane Hood, a Vale farmer with several generations of farmers before him in the family, knows how badly people react to tractors and larger trucks on the road.
"People are so impatient. They see tractors or slow-moving trucks, they'll pass you on the curve on a double yellow line every time," Hood said.
Hours are another disadvantage to farming, as some neighbors find out the hard way. Hood, whose farm includes beef cattle, hay and chickens, said some work is only done at night. Gathering the chickens when they're ready for market is one of those things, as light tends to rile chickens.
"And we're using a tow motor, and tow motor traffic can get pretty loud when you're catching chickens early in the morning," he said of the job usually done at 1 a.m.
The hours can be long, but Hood said he tries to be conscientious of his neighbors.
"There's times we work all night, but I try not to bother anybody," he said. "Just a while back, I was thinking about collecting hay at 3 a.m., but I figured I'd disturb people."
While Hood tries to be considerate of others, he said people moving near a farm should expect a certain amount of disruption. Small farms aren't economically feasible any more. The family-run small operations are a thing of the past, he said, as the upkeep can run such a farmer out of business quickly.
Hood went into the chicken business by contracting with Case Farms and making a family business with his parents and wife. They normally have about 105,000 chickens in each flock at a time, receiving them shortly after they are hatched and keeping them for about nine weeks. Since Hood's farm has five chicken houses, that means he keeps a number of chickens at all times.
His family has historically run dairy farms in the county, but decided to get into chicken farming in the 1990s.
"I love to watch chickens grow," he said, while standing in one of his chicken houses and watching the almost fully-grown flock create a wall-to-wall white carpet. "Me and my dad, we're cow men, but chickens is where the money is."
George said the district is something that has been discussed since the mid-1990s. It's a combination of methods to preserve farmland and also promote agriculture. Rather than pinpointing an area of the county as a particular zone to control growth, it is a classification of land already being used for agriculture.
In 2002, the county put together a group of people from the State Farm Bureau, agricultural supporters and representatives from the state agency. The state created a model ordinance for counties to use in creating their own version.
"We worked through the ordinances, and there were a lot of ups and downs," George said. "In our department, we had directors come and go during this time and the project got set to the side."
The ordinance got revisited in 2004 and, after some tweaking, was approved during a recent board of commissioner's meeting. Now, an advisory board will be set to make the important decisions about the ordinance. George said the county is hoping to start getting applications from residents for their property to be named part of the district.
"The program is a really good thing," George said. "It raises awareness of the contributions of farms in the county, in particular when it is part of the heritage of the county."
Guy Cornman, planning director for Davidson County, said his county has had such a district for about two years. He said the district has been, for the most part, positive, however it has come with "a little heartburn."
Interstate 85 travels through Davidson County, a part of which has been labeled a "corridor of economic opportunity." Cornman describes the area as good place for a large industrial user to locate, and is therefore valuable to the county.
But the two uses are not compatible, so the agricultural areas that fall in that area are not eligible to participate in the program. The incompatibility came to a head when Toyota was looking at the area.
Local farmers appealed the decision, bringing between 150 and 200 lobbyists to the commissioners' meeting.
"It's still maintained as an EDC, but we're looking into ways they can co-exist," Cornman said.
Cornman said the importance behind such districts is to help slow the loss of farmland across the state.
"I think we'll come to depend more and more on small farms in the future," he said.
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