Articles from the Planning Commissioners Journal
on farm and agriculture related topics
-- for more details and to order & download, click on titles below --
Special Summer 2006 Issue on Agriculture & Food including:

  • Farmland Protection: What's Behind the Growing Interest? Keith Schneider examines why more towns, cities, and counties are recognizing the benefits of farmland protection, and some of the strategies being used to keep land in agricultural use.
  • Community Food Needs & Opportunities. A look at the growing interest in community food systems, in which food is grown, processed, and distributed locally.
  • This Little Piggy Went to Market: The Journey from Farm to Table. Transportation planner Hannah Twaddell provides an overview of the transport of food in America today.
  • Wanted: Downtown Grocery Stores. Downtown and main street expert Kennedy Smith highlights the importance of building character and individuality into new town centers.

    note: above articles available to download either individually, or by ordering complete issue

    • Purchase of Development Rights: Preserving Farmland and Open Space
  • Gayle Miller and Douglas Krieger provide an introduction to PDR programs: how they work, what they can accomplish, and questions that often come up in developing a program.
    • Land Trusts and Planning Commissions: Forging Strategic Alliances
  • Land trusts provide an important resource for communities concerned about preserving open space, farmland, and natural resources. Joel Russell provides an introduction to the role land trusts can play.
    • Putting Growth In Its Place With Transfer of Development Rights
  • Transfer of development rights offers communities a way of saving environmentally sensitive areas, farmland, and historic landmarks. Planner Rick Pruetz examines how transfer of development rights programs work, and what makes some more successful than others.
    • Farmers' Markets
  • Now numbering more than 2,400 nationwide, local farmers markets provide one of the best ways of increasing downtown activity, while offering a valuable outlet for area farmers. Author and lecturer Roberta Brandes Gratz takes a closer look at the role farmers' markets can play -- and why they've become so popular.
    • Growing Greener: Conservation Subdivision Design
  • Noted conservation planner Randall Arendt has developed a framework for subdivision review that encourages the preservation of open space, farmland, and other natural areas, while enhancing the market value of development.
    • Download our 7 page index to more than 200 articles published in the Planning Commissioners Journal.