ROOM AT THE TABLE - Intersight - University at Buffalo

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in 1993, the Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board was comprised
of representatives of Erie County farms and agribusiness, the County
Legislature, Planning, Real Property Tax, Cornell Cooperative Extension,
Soil and Water Conservation District, and the Western New York Land
Conservancy.
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the county would pursue its goals of agriculture and farmland preservation.
Those goals include: (1) establishment of a working group extension of the
Erie County Agricultural and Farmland Protection Board for execution of
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farm lands, regions, areas, properties; (3) encouragement of the immediate
employment of recommendations, concepts and tools to further the strategy
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priority areas and/or opportunities for agricultural and farmland preservation
within Erie County; and (5) development of a package of concepts and
tools for the preservation and protection of farm and agricultural land to
be considered at the town level. 49 To achieve these goals, concepts and
recommendations were grouped around seven main subject areas (policy,
land conservation and stewardship, education and public relations, land
use planning and implementation, taxation and compensation, economic
development of agriculture, and business, retirement and estate planning).
Within this framework, all proposed recommendations are organized.
The plan, as a whole, takes great pains to fairly represent the
agricultural landscape of Erie County. The plan chronicles the change of the
history of agriculture in Erie County over time, the large decrease of farms
countywide between 1940 and 1990, representing a 73 percent decline, and
the increase of regulations designed to protect the consumer and nation’s
food supply, yet has been viewed as an ever complex web for the farmer to
contend with. The plan views Erie County as a “metropolitan based county
70