NO PROGRESS TOWARD understanding surfaced at Wednesday evening’s Clallam County Planning Commission hearing on regulations governing agriculture in the county.
Steve Ragsdale, owner of Sunshine Herb and Lavender Farm in the Diamond Point area, wished Clallam would follow Jefferson County’s lead.
When restrictions on farm operations eased, “a vibrant ag community sprang up,” he said.
Agricultural structures in Jefferson County must be built in accordance with the building code, but are exempt from building permits, regardless of size, Ragsdale said.
In Clallam County, his lavender drying shed had to be professionally engineered at a cost of $1,500, and the permit was “close to that,” he said.
Applying factory standards to farm buildings, disproving an incorrect wetland designation and submitting a landscaping plan for a nursery were among rulings that ballooned his expected $200,000 investment to close to $800,000, he said.
“Five years going through the planning process is expensive and painful, and this seems to make it worse,” Ragsdale said.
Rick Olsen agreed.
Proposed limits on agri-tourism and other farm activities are “driving the area into a suburbia like King County,” said the Cays Road lavender farmer.
“If you really want rural farms, you need to reevaluate your approach to zoning for agriculture,” Olsen said
Sid Maroney, Nash’s Organic Produce farm share coordinator, objected to limiting farm stands to opening 180 days per year, which is just half of the 360 days that Nash’s Dungeness-area stand now operates.
Contrarily, Kathleen Smith, a long-term rural Agnew area resident, said the planners did “a fabulous job of accommodating farmers and agriculture interests,” while limiting the “impact on others” from farm activities.
“There’s a conflict of expectations — most people moved here to enjoy a small piece of earth and not be subjected to noise, lights, traffic, pollutants, pesticides,” she said.
“I live on a farm, but I don’t want to see a two-story stack of hay with a blue tarp.”
Opposing farm stands, she suggested trucking produce to in-town farmers markets to draw tourists there and keep traffic out of rural areas.
“Is it better to have a few farms spread across the landscape, or one-acre residential lots that use far more water and pollutants?” responded Clallam County WSU Extension Agent Curtis Beus.
“Jefferson County has about a third the ag land Clallam has, yet they’ve been able to innovate with no negative impact,” he said.
Beus and Friends of the Fields founder Robert Caldwell both lamented lack of success for efforts to protect agriculture resources, despite Clallam County’s unique climate and soils.
The roughly 6,200-acre Agriculture Retention zone, demanded to settle a 1996 lawsuit, inappropriately includes a 200-acre marsh and about 3,000 acres of pre-existing small parcels, Beus noted.
New lots in the retention zone must be at least 16 acres, but those smaller pre-existing lots remain.
Most working farms lie in other rural zones.
Beus cited his own 30-acre Lost Mountain farm, previously divided into four parcels but now zoned for 20 acres. If the farm fails, “rational economics” would require selling each lot separately, he said.
“Changes that were made didn’t accomplish much at all,” Caldwell agreed.
“We need to protect those small farms, and a lot of what’s in here goes the other way.”
Planning Manager Steve Gray pointed people to the county website, www.clallam.net/RealEstate/html/agaccessoryuses.htm, or http://tinyurl.com/clallamag, to review the proposed changes prior to another work session on agriculture, probably in October, but said complaints from residents of rural areas about farm activities are common.
Conversely, Gray said, county staff is “not seeing . . . that there’s been a lot of real true barriers” to agriculture-based businesses.
“Nonsense decisions” that short-circuit innovative agriculture are real and common, Beus countered.
County rulings “quashed” Steve Johnson’s attempts to market fish from the Lazy J Farm pond and offer Olympic Discovery Trail travelers a “farm stay” in a one-room log cabin.
“Little things add up over time,” Johnson said. “Regulations shut us down very often.”
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Martha Ireland was a Clallam County commissioner from 1996 through 1999 and is the secretary of the Republican Women of Clallam County, among other community endeavors.
Martha and her husband, Dale, live on a Carlsborg-area farm. Her column appears every Friday.
E-mail: irelands@olypen.com.