Witness protection - Bold Strokes - Lancaster County, Pennsylvania - Brief Article

Sierra, March-April, 2003

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a verdant patchwork of small farms, has been losing more than 2,500 acres of agricultural land per year to sprawl. But the county also leads the nation in farm-saving efforts, so that Lancaster's chickens will likely be laying omelet makings far into the future.

Since 1982, the county's Agricultural Preserve Board and the Lancaster Farmland Trust have been gently nudging hundreds of property owners, a third of whom are Amish farmers, to sell or donate the development rights to their land. Called conservation easements, the agreements create permanent restrictions on land use. Nestled between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, the county is ripe for sprawl, but as of November 2002 the easements have saved 50,000 acres on 603 farms--including the Witness Farm, owned by an Amish family and used to film the eponymous 1985 Harrison Ford thriller.--M.B.S.