Know Your Neighbor
Thought I might give you a chuckle today. This showed up on one of the blogs I read that is posted by a farmer on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Sailors Small Farm. She reads this blog as well as the one I write for the Wild Ramp Market in Huntington and I really appreciate that a lot of what she experiences is similar to what the farmers here in West Virginia tell me. It is a small community, really.
Her blog today reminded me of something I experienced years ago, in an earlier chapter of my life. I lived for quite a while in Connecticut where I was an appraiser during the real estate boom of the 1980s.
I was sent out to appraise a new house for a bank underwriting its mortgage in a rural area in the northeastern section of the state. A new subdivision of McMansions had sprung up that provided large homes within an hour commute of Boston. The house was very nice with a great floorplan and good quality materials.
BUT it was located next to a composting operation. The aroma, to put it nicely, was STINKY.
My advice…..don’t ever purchase a house next to anything that smells or makes a lot of noise. The reason it might be such a “good buy” will give you headaches when you try to sell it.
And on the flip side, I want to commend people like Aimee Neeley Figgatt who has turned her family’s Century Farm near Dunbar into a state conservation area to preserve its use as agricultural forever.
wvfarm2u 
Awww! For a second there I thought the sign was about my next door neighbor! LOL
Seriously, This is a growing problem. I grew up in my teens in a rural township located next to a growing suburb. There was an old lady we called, “The sheep lady”. She had a small sheep farm but it was eventually surrounded by modern homes. The township, now an example of modern suburbia, passed laws to shut her farm down. It killed the old woman (she warned the papers that it would). Today, there is not one shred of evidence there was ever a farm there. It is sad. We really should promote mini and hobby farms, not try and outlaw them. BTW, today I woke like many days, to the sound of my more distant neighbors rooster crowing. How I would miss that!
Too many folks seem to idolize a rural setting, then move in and want to eliminate all the sounds and smells that go with rural. I was really sad to see the changes when I returned to a place I lived almost 20 years ago… all the lovely orchards that used to provide some of the most delicious apples, peaches and cherries were all replaced with malls and McMansions and multilane freeways.
This problem goes hand in hand with the disinclination for younger members of farm families to continue in that lifestyle, leaving the family to have to dispose of the farm. The concept of land conservation is one that can be considered to purchase development rights and then permit the land itself to be sold less expensively to another farmer.