NOT all that long ago, this was a dairy town, with cows nibbling on the grass along the town’s sleepy spine, Route 7, and barns and silos rising as majestic as castles across the landscape.
Those days are gone, and by some estimates there may be only a handful of dairy farms left out of a peak of 200 in the mid-20th century. Route 7, progressively widened and manicured, now sports a Staples, Home Depot and Wal-Mart because developers have swallowed up the farms and turned them into hundreds of houses and apartments whose occupants need places to shop.
But the town has not abandoned its agrarian spirit, and in late July it made a bold statement that farming still matters. With about 40 farms left that mostly grow hay and vegetables, the town passed what it calls a right-to-farm ordinance. It cautioned all those home-owning arrivistes that this is farm country, son, though it put it a little more formally.
“Agriculture is a significant part of the town of New Milford’s heritage and a vital part of the town’s future,” the preamble read.
The ordinance essentially told newcomers to think twice before complaining about the fragrance of manure wafting into their backyards at planting time or the growl of tractors, the bellowing of cattle, or the crowing of roosters at dawn. It urged the newcomers not to object to the dust kicked up by plows or the pumping of sprinklers when farms have to be irrigated at night. Grumblers would have to take their beefs to a mediation panel.
A half-dozen farmers interviewed could not recall receiving any nuisance complaints themselves. But they see the ordinance as a pre-emptive strike, one that Bonnie Weed, a farmer, describes as “an insurance policy.” When neighbors do complain, farmers will have the law to back them up.
“New Milford is making a statement that they support agriculture, that they support the farming industry, which is not a position a lot of communities take,” said Jeremy Schulz, who farms 200 acres of corn, tomatoes, pumpkins and other vegetables that he and his wife, Willow, sell from a stand on Route 7.
The farmers are clearly conscious of how their work affects neighbors. Bill Weed, 50, a farmer’s son who with Bonnie, his wife, grows hay and feed corn on 240 acres, is aware that when he runs a 14-foot wide hay mower down a country lane at 12 miles an hour, impatient drivers behind him seethe in frustration. He knows he upsets neighbors when he and his crew are harvesting hay at 11 at night to get it baled and in the barn before a thunderstorm ruins it. Not everyone may be in love with his eight Belted Galloway cattle, even if they bear such cute names as Oreo, Doo-wop and Pebbles. But that is the price of having farms in your midst.
The paradox is that many professionals who move to New Milford and commute to jobs in Stamford or New Haven chose the town because of its rural character. When they get there they want that rural character to be sort of like a painting — silent and inanimate in the background. But it can’t be.
“They want to move to the country so they’re surprised that farming can mean a nuisance,” is the way Ms. Weed puts it.
While Litchfield County continues losing farms, farmers here see a flicker of hope in the growing interest, by those alarmed by reports of tainted food, in having their produce locally grown so they can have a more secure sense of what went into the growing. There are at least four farm stands in New Milford. Mr. Schulz, 34, a first generation farmer who fell in love with farming as a teenage helper, recently opened a market that will use his farm’s produce in dishes that his wife and others will cook, including eggplant parmigiana made with the eggplants they grew.
Private efforts to preserve farms in New Milford go back at least three decades. For 15 years, the Weeds have leased their land under an agreement with the Nature Conservancy, the nonprofit land group that bought the land to preserve it as a farm. But as development has consumed thousands of acres, transforming New Milford from village to exurb, farmers have become an endangered species, and the town decided it needed to step in. It formed a farm preservation commission, one of whose members, Daniel Readyoff, a lawyer who is the son of a Bridgewater farmer, drafted the ordinance.
A handful of Connecticut towns have passed similar measures protecting farmers, and the state already has such a measure, but it applies only to farms in place for at least a year. The town’s ordinance also set up a five-person panel to mediate disputes that arise.
The farmers were pleasantly surprised that when the town council put the ordinance up for a vote, 75 people showed up, but not one to protest.
“When it was finally done, it was the best of democracy,” Mr. Weed said. “Everybody came out a winner.”
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