From rural to urban: 'It's hard to hold on land now'

This is a text adaptation of CNN's Special Report, "Where We Live," which will air Sunday, October 1 at 10 p.m. EDT.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Georgia farmer Buddy Shelnutt is worried.

"I think maybe it's a sense of Atlanta coming this way," he says. "Are we going to be able to still continue [to] do our real life, like we have always done? Or are we going to have to change?"

Shelnutt lives in Oconee County, and change is coming his way. With the widening of State Highway 316, Shelnutt is now about one hour's drive from Atlanta. Even the road in front of his house has changed.

"I've been here for 52 years and I've seen it go from a dirt road to what it is now. And it's just going to get worse with all the building all around. ... We have trouble getting in and out of the driveway with these trucks and tractors pulling hay and all down the road. It's dangerous," Shelnutt complains.

Oconee County is rural, with a population of just 25,000. But that's up 40 percent in less than a decade and the growth rate is predicted to accelerate.

"They found a good place to live out here and people want to move out in a rural setting, you know, they love the country. And you really can't blame people for wanting to move out here," Shelnutt says.

Shelnutt's 55-acre cattle farm has been in family for more than 100 years. He and his wife, Kathy, have full-time jobs elsewhere. They farm part-time because they like the lifestyle. But the Shelnutts fears a threat to that lifestyle is just across his fence, where a developer plans to build 200 houses.

"It's going to really change our way of life, I think, when we have all these homes in here and we start spreading chicken litter, you know, to fertilize our fields and all and I'm sure these folks may not like to smell that stuff, but that's the way we do things here," Shelnutt says.

But Rob Fine, the developer of the land next to the Shelnutt farm, says he has "no intention of coming in and trying to disturb anybody's way of life."

"We felt like we had bought a tract of land and we had a right to do certain things with our land that was within our rights as, you know, as citizens of the U.S.," says Fine.

"Urban sprawl is taking away by pricing land beyond ... the farmer's ability to purchase that land," says agricultural law expert Stanley Lawson. "It's taking it out of his reach to be able to afford to stay in business, or to expand."

Recently Lawson led a meeting at the Watkinsville Library on ways to preserve farmland and cope with other disruptions from development.

"I would suggest that in Oconee and other counties that are getting challenged by this kind of sprawl, that we start figuring how to get local ordinances and getting people elected who will require the people to develop to pay the cost of bringing in the things we don't have in the farmland," suggests audience member Doug Haines. "The streets, the police service, the fire service, the sewer and all of these utilities and impose this on the people who are elevating the cost of the property and that will equalize things a lot."

Impact fees levied on developers may help pay for additional services. But they have no effect on land values inflated by development. Higher property values mean higher taxes. Shelnutt's land is assessed at a value seven times higher than it was before the development began. Even after tax discounts for working farms, his tax bill has quadrupled. He fears it will quadruple again.

"Our property value is going to go up, even though our land hasn't changed any over the years that we've been here. Our value of our property is going up and it does make it harder to keep it, keep this place," Shelnutt explains.

"I personally don't believe that this development has much effect at all on farmers in Oconee County, being pushed off their land and not being able to afford to farm their land anymore," says Fine. "What's causing farmers in Oconee County to go out of business is the simple matter of economics. ... There's as much farmland available today as there was in Oconee County ... 30, 40 years ago."

While that may be true, Shelnutt wants some space between his farm and somebody's dream house.

"I don't mind seeing the houses, you know, come in here but it' s the density of it, 200 houses, that's a lot of homes," Shelnutt says. "If they can go back 100 foot from the property line and make that a greenspace, that would be a natural buffer. But the developer may not want to do anything like that."

But Fine agreed to add some green space. The compromise is a new type of development, Oconee County's first conservation subdivision. The lot sizes and number of houses have been reduced and some land will remain natural and undeveloped.

"What this means is you would bring the lots back up in here and cluster them more up in the higher of the terrain and you would start to create wider bands of green space around the property," Fine says. "The lots reduced in size from over one-acre lots to three-quarter-acre lots. We pulled back away from the creeks. The buffers against the Shelnutt property, we increased that to twice what it was before, to 80-foot-wide buffers, where we met them. So I would say this, this type of development probably reduces urban sprawl."

There are many programs to help retain farmland, not because there's a shortage or loss of it. Some state and local governments have decided undevelopedspace is environmentally and aesthetically desirable.

"It's a balance," says Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, "recognizing that not all farms are going to be saved but sufficient numbers of them are going to be saved, so as to balance a quality of life. Now how do you do that? You do it by making sure that those farmers are not taxed out of existence."

Every state has some kind of tax incentive for farmers, but 20 states have programs to buy development rights from farmers. The farmers get money, but the land can never be developed. Georgia has no such program, a situation many at the Watkinsville Library meeting want to change.

"The farmland trust, if it's established in the state would purchase the development rights on a piece of farmland. The farmer could still own that land, he could still farm that land, he could sell it to another farmer, he could sell it to anybody he wanted to, but whomever he sold it to would have to keep it as a farm," explains audience member Russ Page.

"That's correct, that's the idea of this program. You don't take away the right to sell property," Lawson says. "You have is a voluntary conveyance of those development rights in perpetuity, which means 100 years from now it will still be there, if we are here as a society."

If quality of life issues continue to dominate the public dialogue, there will be more examination of where we live. But ultimately the citizenry will have to decide what, if anything, should be done about the way cities are growing and what management, if any, there should be of the free market.

Buddy Shelnutt is still worried.

"It's been in our family little over 100 years and I would like to leave it for my two boys ... when I, you know, pass on. You know, I hope they can continue at least for their children, too, because it's hard to hold on to land now," Shelnutt says. "But there might come a time when we can't do that. And if that time comes, we'll just have to sell with the rest of them and let houses go on this place."

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