Driving down the backroads of Salem County, Dean Sparks listed off land sales like a one-man Zillow page. The farmer and deputy mayor of Oldmans Township has been keeping close tabs on who sells their land and who doesn’t in this little pocket of South Jersey.
“This was bought for $30,000 an acre,” he said, pointing toward a seemingly anonymous plot of farmland. “I know the guys that owned it, and that was considered big money at the time, but now, I mean they’re just throwing around crazy numbers.”
Sparks was referring to the deep-pocketed warehouse developers that in the last several years have helped transform Salem County into a logistics hub, standing up 5.1 million square feet of warehouse space for retailers, such as Amazon, since 2020.
But not every landowner has jumped at the opportunity. Sparks has turned down multiple offers to purchase his 130 acres of land. “A guy from Wall, New Jersey, called me up and said, ‘I got somebody interested in your farm. I’d like to bring him down to talk to you.’ And I said, ‘Let me give you a piece of advice: Don’t waste your gas, because I’m not interested.’”
Sparks said he has encouraged other farmers to do the same and pointed them toward resources such as the New Jersey Farmland Preservation Program, which purchases the development rights to farmland and preserves it for agricultural use.
The difficulty in making this case is that developers are offering more money per square foot than the state is, according to Sparks, which has left the future of Salem County as an agricultural community in the hands of individual farmers.
A lack of incentive: In nearby Pilesgrove, dairy farmer and township mayor Kevin Eachus told a similar story. While not necessarily anti-warehouse development, he said his objective is to “keep permanent preservation an option on the table.”
However, this has gotten harder with the influx of developer money. “Pilesgrove had like, seven applications for preservation, and now we only have one,” he said. “So it is taking a toll on preservation.”
The Stage Agricultural Development Committee has taken steps to even the scales, as it explores a new formula designed to bring the value of preservation closer to full-market values, but these efforts are still ongoing.
In the meantime, the math is pretty straightforward, according to Grant Harris, fourth-generation owner of the Cowtown Farmers Market and rodeo in Pilesgrove, who has turned down offers in the range of $40 million.
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“The interest on that kind of money is more than you make farming on a good year,” he said. “That’s a lot of doggone money.”
Even for someone who is “sentimental” about farming such as Sparks will admit farming is a tough business. “You’re never going to get filthy rich farming, and you better like to work, because you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot,” he said.
Developers are aware of this reality when they come to the table with their offers.
“They’re taking a ton of risk to not make a lot of money,” Ryan Curran, president of Curran Commercial, which has assembled several properties for warehouse development, told Retail Brew. “Who the hell wants to live like that?”
Photo by Alex Vuocolo
Free for all development: Aside from these personal considerations, whether preserving farmland in general is a worthwhile social goal is a separate question, and one with its own set of challenges.
As Curran pointed out, municipalities can wield their zoning laws to dictate which kinds of development takes place within their borders.
However, the state’s current approach of letting individual municipalities decide these issues has led to a lack of coordination, Donna Rendeiro, executive director of the New Jersey Planning Commission, explained. “It’s a home rule state, and so because of that, it creates some of these challenges that we’re seeing now pop up in a lot of places,” she said.
Home rule means each town administers and collects its own taxes, leading to mixed incentives depending on their economic makeup and budgetary needs. In Salem County, that’s resulted in sometimes competing prerogatives between more populous townships such as Carneys Point and less populous townships such as Pilesgrove and Oldsman.
Ken Brown, mayor of Carneys Point, has been a vocal supporter of warehouses mainly because of the much-needed tax dollars and economic activity that they’ve brought into the community, particularly for its small businesses.
“They almost can’t keep up with the business that’s going on right now,” he said. “Everything is bursting at the seam.”
Taking the broader view, Rendeiro said that she understands how much of a positive impact the logistics industry has had on New Jersey, “but we also believe that we want to make sure that they’re sited and sized properly,” she said.