Several farm auctions, opportunities ahead for Tecumseh Land Trust
- Published: August 19, 2024
Some farmland surrounding Yellow Springs is up for auction — and bids are coming in.
For sale are two, 20.6-acre tracts on Dayton-Yellow Springs Road — near the Snypp Road intersection, beyond Village limits — as well as two 19.9-acre tracts on West Jackson Road, just beyond Young’s Jersey Dairy in Clark County.
Hosted by real estate company Sheridans LLC, the auction for all four farms is set to take place on Thursday, Aug. 22, at 1 p.m., at the Cedar Land Event Center at 200 Parkview Lane, in Cedarville. All four properties are zoned agricultural and are owned by David Welch.
As of press time, two starting bids of $150,000 have been made by an anonymous bidder for the two tracts on Dayton-Yellow Springs Road — an amount below the $275,000 asking price for each of the four available tracts.
While local nonprofit Tecumseh Land Trust, or TLT, has fought to conserve area farmland from development since 1990 — placing protective easements on 37,000 acres throughout Greene, Clark and surrounding counties over the last three decades — TLT Executive Director Michele Burns told the News last week that the organization does not intend to purchase any of the available farmland.
“But when any farm goes to auction, we try to help find friendly buyers who want to keep it farmland,” Burns said, and added that she will be present for next week’s auction.
“I’ll be there with information about what [TLT] does, what programs we offer and how we can help a buyer keep these tracts as farmland,” she said. “But we are not launching a huge campaign.”
What TLT will do, however, is keep its eyes locked on additional land near the sale sites that, according to Burns, will likely go up for sale in the coming months.
Owing to the transactional sensitivity around large swaths of land being sold at once, and out of respect for the owners, Burns was unable to specify where that land is or when such a sale would occur.
Burns did indicate, though, that some of that future available farmland is near the Village’s urban service boundary, and has been identified by TLT and the Village as “priority areas” for conservation, as outlined in the 2020 Comprehensive Land Use Plan. When that land does go up for sale, Burns said, TLT will make a push to protect it against future development through conservation easements.
“We like to work with land use plans,” Burns explained. “We want development to occur where it makes sense to occur. That’s what I love about our urban service boundary — it shows where there’s land to develop that can be served by our utilities. Sure, we want growth, but only growth in the right places.”
Protecting area farmland from development is not an effort that Burns believes is at odds with the local calls for more housing in and around the village — especially affordable housing.
“When we talk about affordability, there’s sometimes this dialogue that says greenspace protection and affordable housing can’t go together,” she said. “I disagree adamantly. When you’re getting housing in these kinds of areas — the township, the county — they’re often not affordable. New homes on these lands are often large houses on large lots that take up a lot of land not being used to its greatest potential.”
According to Burns, that’s what will likely happen with the four tracts of farmland up for sale now: The acreage is too minimal for a new subdivision, and because they’re all removed from municipal infrastructure, they’ll likely be purchased for single-family homes — an outcome with which Burns is not wholly dismayed.
“We all have to live somewhere, right?” she said.
Still, despite her prediction for the upcoming auction on Aug. 22, Burns is keeping the faith for the importance of conserving other farmland around Yellow Springs, which is colloquially known as the “greenbelt.” For her and the rest of TLT, it’s not just the open views and green vistas, but the earth beneath the farms that need protection.
Per the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 3% of the world’s soil is prime agricultural land — that is, land with physical and chemical characteristics that yield optimum cultivation, pasture or forestry. Much of that soil sits below Yellow Springs and all throughout the Midwest.
As Burns previously told the News: “Prime soil is the very best soil to grow food that requires the least amount of inputs and additives, and that provides the best yields.”
The News will continue to report on the ongoing sale of farmland around municipal limits as developments and details arise. Go to http://www.sheridanteam.com/auction/mini-farm-lots/#more_details for more information on the presently available farmland outside of the village that’s for sale.
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