Jehovah Jirah Farm Updates
A letter from Jehovah Jireh Farm:
Dear Friends, There have been a number of developments and growing support with regards to our farm lease situation that is encouraging. We are becoming hopeful that something will be worked out with our lease so that we can continue to farm.
- A number of you have written letters of appeal to Doug Duncan, the county executive; the Montgomery County Council, and others in the County. Thank you for taking the time to write on our behalf.
- One of our customers, Becky Ross, brought to our attention that Montgomery County has a Voluntary Rent Guideline for landlords for rent increases of 4.4% for 2006. Our rent increase is 2300%!
- We discovered that the county’s Office of Real Estate did not follow any of the legal requirements in giving a rent increase.
- Two of the ladies who were part of the original selection committee that selected our bid (out of almost 20 bids) to lease the farm and fix up the house, have written a letter of appeal to the County to adhere to the 4.4% voluntary rent guideline and to give us a 20-year lease . We have not heard the final count, but quite a few community groups also signed onto the letter.
- Today the Gazette published our story in the upcounty Gazette newspapers about our needing to close the farm. The article is well written and will provide you with a number of additional details. It also raises the additional concerns about the increasing difficulty of farmers being able to farm in the agricultural reserve. You can see the full story at this link: www.gazette.net/stories/041906/poolnew192015_31967.shtml
The article ends with this quote:
Myron Horst said their proposed rent increase raises many other issues about farming within the county. “The impression we got in talking with the ones in the Office of Real Estate, who handles our lease, was farming was really not important to them,” he said. “The fact that we are in the Ag Reserve really did not make a difference. One of the problems I see happening with the Ag Reserve is it is becoming a residential community of big estates that are not really farms.”
A number of you have asked what you can do to help save the farm. You can call or write a letter of appeal to the County. As we understand it, the only way we can be granted a lease longer than five years is if the County Executive grants it by executive order. A five year lease would work, but at the end of five years a number of personnel in the County will have changed and we might be back in the same situation that we are now. Before you write or call, we encourage you to take a look at the pictures of the house before we fixed up the house, and what it looks like now, if you have not looked at them already. When we rented the farm, the house was nothing like what it is now and was uninhabitable. We did not receive any money from Montgomery County to fix up the house and garage. You can see the pictures on our website at this link: http://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/before%20and%20after.pdf In contacting the County, also appeal to them to make it possible for other farmers who want to produce food, to be able to start farming in Montgomery County’s Ag Reserve.
Doug Duncan’s email is: Douglas.Duncan@montgomerycountymd.gov and the email addresses and phone numbers for the County Council members can be found at this link: http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/csltmpl.asp?url=/content/council/contact.asp