OTTAWA COUNTY, Mich. – MiFarmLink, a new project based on Michigan’s southwest side, is looking to try and keep farmland in the farming business and out of development.

The project launched its web site in May of this year with a $44,885 grant from the USDA. Its goals are several, but central to its mission is to help farmers do succession planning so that the land can continue to be farmed by new and beginning farmers. Part of its mission is to serve as an information hub for farmers as well as a network to help farmers communicate with each other.

It also wants to be a listing service to help connect buyers and sellers of farmland. Although it is a listing service, it doesn’t want to be just that, said Becky Huttenga, an Ottawa County resident who heads up the new project.

“One of the goals of the project is to connect buyers and sellers of farmland, thus the Landlink web site,” Huttenga said. “The folks that are going to list there are people who want the land to remain farmland.”

She also wants to help farmers find lawyers who have an expertise with succession planning and connect farmers with various resources. Huttenga grew up on a small farm in Ottawa County and has lived in the area her whole life. She said farming is “in my blood.”

This new project – MiFarmLink – grew out of a worry that the county was losing too much farmland. According to a survey done by the Ottawa County Planning Department in 2019, the county lost 8 percent of its farmed acreage and 17 percent of its farms between 2012 and 2017. Ottawa County farmers produce more than $506 million in products each year, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture. The county is fast growing and has a low unemployment rate. Fast growth can come at a cost of unplanned development, Huttenga said. The department used results of the survey to write its Focus on Agriculture plan to help the area devise a way to grow without losing too many farms.

Ottawa County’s farmland preservation program seeks to protect this vital industry, however, not all localities have the funds to have a robust program. According to Huttenga, within the past couple years the state’s farmland preservation office got a substantial infusion of money, the first such infusion since 2009. “Most local purchase of development rights (PDR) programs do not have enough money to fully finance PDRs,” she said. She pointed to Washtenaw County in southeastern lower Michigan as one example of a program with robust funding. The county has “a lot of different funding sources,” she said. In some instances, the county is able to fully fund an easement, without the seller having to donate any of the value of the farmland.

But Huttenga said the best way for farmland to stay farmland is for the farming business to be a good line of work, for people to get in it and stay in it. In her words, “the best way to protect farmland is to make it a viable profession that people can eventually retire from. That way people won’t have to do easements.” One of the recommendations from the Focus on Agriculture plan is that farmers diversify their revenue sources, for example, by using marginal land for solar arrays, adding wind turbines, transitioning some areas to high margin specialty crops, and using the “shared economy” to generate income through renting or sharing equipment.

A copy of the Focus on Agriculture plan is available as a free download at the Ottawa County Planning Department web page, https://www.miottawa.org/Departments/Planning/farmland.htm. To learn more about the MiFarmLink project, visit https://www.mifarmlink.org/.