NC budget allocated $48.9 million for farmland preservation

The new state budget, recently signed into law, allocates $48.9 million to the Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund. For fiscal year 2027, $46.9 million is allocated in non-recurring funds and $2 million in recurring funds, as outlined in the Joint Conference Committee Report on the Current Operations Appropriations Act of 2026.

“North Carolina is the third-fastest growing state, according to the US Census Bureau. We are experiencing development across the state, making it imperative we take action to protect farms and farmland,” Steve Troxler, commissioner of the NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (NCDA&CS), told the Carolina Journal. “We are appreciative that the new budget provides additional recurring funds for our farmland preservation efforts, bringing the total recurring funds to $7 million and providing an additional $46.9 million in non-recurring funds. Interest in farmland conservation is great; additional funding helps ensure we have the farmland resources we need going forward to continue to provide for ourselves, the nation, and the world.”

 “For a couple of decades now, we’ve been very concerned about the accelerating loss of farmland in North Carolina,” Rep. Jimmy Dixon, R-Duplin, told the Carolina Journal. “The Farmland Preservation Trust Fund that was initiated and set up by Commissioner Troxler has been a small effort directed towards a huge problem, but a lot of times the small efforts pay off… I’m very well pleased with the amount of money that we’ve been able to allocate for the Farmland Preservation.”

The NCDA&CS Farmland Preservation Trust Fund has protected over 42,000 acres of farmland. North Carolina is the No. 1 state at risk of farmland loss, Troxler told farmers and others in the industry earlier this year.  Troxler has concerns that North Carolina could reach a tipping point at which production increases cannot keep pace with land loss. Removing forests and farmland from the state changes its makeup, and Troxler’s concern is that their disappearance will alter one of the most beautiful states in the nation, which attracts a high volume of tourism every year. 

North Carolina is on track to lose 1.2 million acres by 2040 or about 11% of current farmland, according to the American Farmland Trust (AFT), in a report published in 2024 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Farmland preservation is an increasingly critical issue across North Carolina, where urban expansion and resource limitations challenge the sustainability of agricultural landscapes,” reads the report. “There is currently an affordable housing crisis in North Carolina that has created high demands for residential development, with vast commercial development driving economic pressures in some North Carolina counties as well. This has driven many farmers to sell their farmland to developers. Meanwhile, rising land values have constrained existing farmland preservation funding mechanisms.”

Between 2001 and 2016, North Carolina lost about 732,000 acres of agricultural land to housing development, according to the AFT, as outlined in the report. Of that land, 387,000 was deemed to be “nationally significant,” which means that the land has been deemed best suited to growing food and crops. 

“Protecting farmland is a legitimate public interest, but expanding state funding should not be viewed as a substitute for addressing the policies that make farmland more vulnerable to development in the first place,” Kelly Lester, policy analyst for the Center for Food, Power and Life at the John Locke Foundation, told the Carolina Journal. “Before committing additional taxpayer dollars, lawmakers should ask whether existing land use and tax policies are creating incentives that the government is then paying to offset.”

“NC budget allocated $48.9 million for farmland preservation” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.