When it comes to rural Howard County, newcomers have a fatal attraction.
Rural life lures them from Baltimore, Washington and the urbanized suburbs of both cities. But it's a love affair that ultimately kills that way of life.
In the face of rising congestion, development pressures and costs of doing business hard by booming suburbia, many Howard farmers are giving up hastening the transition of the western part of the county from rural to suburban.
In the process, Howard's agricultural heritage is dying.
Between 1982 and 1992, the number of farms in Howard fell from 472 to 382, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And the remaining farms got smaller.
Altogether, the county lost 12,340 acres of farmland, leaving it with 42,370 acres deemed agricultural by state tax assessors or just 26 percent of Howard's total land.
Two years ago, the livestock auction in West Friendship closed. Its property was sold to real estate investors, forcing Howard's -- remaining cattle farmers to take their stock to Carroll County or Pennsylvania for sale.
About the same time, Howard's only rendering plant, in Elkridge, shut down, leaving only more distant and expensive sites for disposal of dead animals.
The reasons for the farming exodus are varied. Some western Howard farmers sell because rising costs mean they can't make a living any longer from the earth. Some can't pay estate taxes on the sky-high value of their land. Some have no heirs interested in farming. And some simply have grown weary of competing with the ex-urbanites' quest for peace and quiet.
Whatever the motivation, the underlying financial realities are the same. An acre of western Howard land sold for residential development can be worth about 30 acres of farmland. Three-acre lots in western Howard now sell for $120,000.
By selling land, struggling farmers can retire, buy a farm farther from traffic, send their children to college or perhaps reap all of these benefits.
No one in county government knows more about that than Charles C. Feaga, Republican farmer turned County Council chairman. Mr. Feaga, who raises black Angus beef cattle on nearly 200 acres just southwest of the zoned limit of Ellicott City's urban development, is one Howard farmer whose days in agriculture are numbered.
In 1988, federal tax officials told Mr. Feaga, his two brothers and two sisters that they would have to pay inheritance taxes on their family farm even though their mother had given them the land before she died. The tax bill was based on the potential development value of the property, not its much lower value as a farm.
To pay the taxes, the Feagas had to sell an option to develop their farm. That option expired, and the farm was not sold. But it's only a matter of time, Mr. Feaga, 62, says.
"It's extremely difficult to raise crops and cattle and work in a community where people don't really understand what your business is about or what you're doing," he says.
It also doesn't help that farmers see 40-hour-a-week bureaucrats moving next door and spending their weekends relaxing on lawn chairs.
"Typically, a successful farmer is going to put 80 to 100 hours a week into his operation," Mr. Feaga says. "No other business does that."
In the face of such trends, county officials are trying to preserve open west county land with zoning regulations that force developers to leave vacant about three-fourths of their developments. Since 1980, the county also has been purchasing development rights from farmers willing to commit their land to continued farming.
But some county efforts to retain western Howard's rural charm have met stiff resistance from farmers and even backfired.
In 1988, the County Council tried to pass zoning rules limiting development in western Howard to an uncongested ratio of one house per 20 acres. Alarmed by a steep cut in the potential value of their land, farmers drove a motorcade of tractors into Ellicott City in protest ' forcing the council to go with a much more populous ratio of one house per 3 acres.
But that was not before many farmers sold out for fear that their chief asset would become worthless. "The 20-acre zoning attempt did more to destroy farming in Howard County than anything ever has," Mr. Feaga says. "There were pieces of property everywhere that went on the market."
As western Howard's farms have been sold, the trappings of agricultural life have begun to fade ' not the least of which is its measured pace.
Chip Ridgely, 29, who rides the back of ornery Brahman bulls for fun, still farms. But he says it gets more difficult every year. Mr. Ridgely, his father and brother operate Spring Meadow Farm, about 200 acres of pasture and cropland in Cooksville, and lease another 300 acres in the west county.
It was not too long ago that their biggest headaches were deer, the weather and crop yields. Today, simply getting to their outlying fields can be a trial.
Cars try to pass wide farm equipment on hills, sometimes forcing farmers off the road. Harried commuters in BMWs and Saabs shake their fists, curse and throw soda cans. "You have to [travel] at a certain time, just to avoid getting killed by the traffic," Mr. Ridgely says.
A down-home store
At Lee's Market in Lisbon, farmers can still find a place to hobnob with each other, the local game warden and the postmaster.
For 180 years, the market has been a vital part of the town, at one time serving as a highway stop for carriages and wagons using the Old National Pike, now Route 144.
Cows still graze in fields a few minutes' walk away. But now most travelers rush by on Interstate 70, just north of town. And just off that highway is a 5-year-old shopping center with a large supermarket, a McDonald's, Pizza Hut and sandwich shop ' substitutes for just about all Lee's services.
"The people coming in are the reason those places get built out here," Dot Gray, Lee's cashier and Lisbon's unofficial mayor, says of the influx of suburbanites.
"They want everything convenient, but yet they want to live in the country.
"We have our own down-home clientele," she says. "Every once in a while, we get new people that like quaint businesses like this, but they are few and far between."
But the down-home clientele is thinning ' in large part because farming, while an uncertain enterprise almost everywhere these days, has become particularly expensive in Howard.
Living near the high-priced Baltimore-Washington corridor raises the cost of almost everything farmers need: labor, insurance, plumbing services and taxes.
Diversifying to survive
To stay in business, many farmers diversify. Some market their produce directly to the public though "pick-your-own" operations, with petting farms and other attractions for suburban children. Others have gone into growing sod or become landscapers. Feed stores now sell gardening and lawn-care equipment to make up for their declining farm-related sales.
The Ridgelys' Cooksville farm, for example, doesn't buy as much seed now because it no longer produces crops for sale. The family has turned to raising beef cattle ' and bulls for professional rodeos.
"You can hardly make anything off of crops," says Chip Ridgely. "You don't see any rich farmers, unless they're into something else. You've got to be into land or cattle or anything else."
The Ridgelys are among a dwindling number of farmers hanging on. But it appears to be a losing battle for most, and so sometimes the fights these days in western Howard are less about substance than respect.
A Howard official, for example, likes to tell the story of watching a farmer hauling a large manure spreader down Old Frederick Road in Woodbine. The spreader was closely followed by a small sports car whose impatient driver repeatedly honked his horn ' even though there was simply no place for the farmer to pull over.
It came as no surprise then to the county official to see that the farmer had engaged the spreading machine a bit early before pulling into a field, flinging his odoriferous cargo across the path of the revved-up coupe.
Tomorrow: Howard's east-west split.
Wednesday: Western Howard's future.