Projections that Doña Ana County will grow from 170,000 people to 260,000 in little more than 10 years make it easy to predict that the green fields and orchards of the Mesilla Valley will be replaced with a sea of rooftops.

There appear to be plenty of reasons to preserve farmland. The total value of agriculture and its multiplier effects on the economy is estimated to be close to a billion dollars annually in the irrigated land south of Elephant Butte Dam. Yet farm sales have kept pace with population growth. The nominal value of farm sales in Doña Ana County grew almost eightfold since 1970.

Agricultural producers in the valley have gone on record that they would like to stay in farming, but don't want to be robbed of their property in the bargain, says Wilmer Harper, agricultural economist with NMSU's Agricultural Experiment Station. Farmers fear regulations that create greenbelts, because they can preclude farmers from adding housing to their land for family members and reduce the land's equity value.

Rhonda Skaggs, an Experiment Station colleague of Harper's, introduced the Mesilla Valley Economic Summit Land Use Committee to a win-win concept for preserving the farmland base-segregating and selling development rights on a voluntary basis.
She invited John B. Wright, NMSU associate professor of geography, to flesh out the idea at a meeting organized by the Doña Ana County Farm and Livestock Bureau in January. Wright is author of Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West and Montana Ghost Dance: Essays on Land and Life,which examined efforts to maintain agricultural lands in the West.

Wright offers a potential breakthrough idea. He notes that fee simple ownership of land can encompass several property rights-including mineral, water and development-which can be sold separately. By selling development rights, which usually amount to anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of land value, to a group that retires those rights, the land can remain in agriculture forever.

The advantages are many, Wright says. If development rights were worth half the land value appraised at $15,000 per acre, selling development rights on 100 acres would bring $750,000 in investment capital for the farmer. At the same time, the property value for inheritance purposes would go down, lessening the effect of estate taxes and lowering the cost of farmland for the next generation of agricultural producers.

But who would buy the rights? Fortunately, a new precedent was set in January in and around Las Vegas, Nev. There, Wright says, the congressional delegation pushed through the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which provided for sale of $100 million worth of U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands nearby for development purposes. Of the proceeds, 85 percent are earmarked for buying conservation and recreational lands.

Wright suggests such a BLM sale in New Mexico could provide funds for a district land trust committee to buy development rights of precious irrigated farmland in the valley. He thinks some 60,000 of 82,000 acres of land between Radium Springs and Santa Teresa might be included in such a plan, leaving land needed for industrial development and moderate expansion of cities and villages that already have invested in nearby infrastructure.

Wright says, too, that the plan must be voluntary on the part of farmers, allowing them to hold back parcels for expansion of family homesteads or other purposes as they see fit. Wright admits there will be plenty of devils in the details, but adds, "What this offers is an opportunity to keep land in farming, if people truly want to do that."