Dan Kuebler stands in the August heat on what used to be his farm, 30 acres in Ashland, Missouri. He started farming at 40 and kept at it for 33 years. He grew dozens of vegetable varieties, then branched into sauerkraut, pickles and kimchi, and he sold all of it at the Columbia Farmers Market while working his other job as an in-home physical therapist.
Ashland was “a little, bitty, sleepy town in ’77 when we bought it,” Kuebler said. That changed. Small towns in southern Boone County filled up with people who worked in Columbia or Jefferson City, and along his two-mile dead-end road, farmland was sold off and cut into parcels. Flat, cleared fields are ideal for building on.
As retirement got closer, Kuebler knew what he did not want. “I don’t want it split up into five-acre plots … and become a development,” he said. “That is just like — that’s sacrilege.”
A promise written into the deed
His answer was a conservation easement, attached to the property deed with help from the Greenbelt Land Trust of Mid-Missouri. Farmland stays farmland, whoever owns it, forever.
“You cannot subdivide it, you cannot sell it off for residential development or commercial development,” said Nick Shapiro, the trust’s executive director. “That is the guiding principle.” The deed binds future owners, and the trust itself has to watch over the easement and defend it. Shapiro put it this way: a donor knows there is “an organization out there that is required to look after that easement in perpetuity.”
A wave of land about to change hands
Kuebler’s road is not unusual. At least 50 million acres of Midwest farmland are expected to change hands by the end of the decade, partly because the people who own and work it are getting old.
American Farmland Trust says about 2,000 acres of farmland a day have recently been lost or compromised by development, and it expects another 18.4 million acres, close to the size of South Carolina, to be converted by 2040. Sprawl is only part of that. Houses on large rural lots used up nearly 7 million acres of agricultural land between 2001 and 2016, and the group’s analysis shows the rate is especially high in Missouri, the wider Midwest and the South.
Josh Wright helps landowners at American Farmland Trust through a process that often takes years. “People who have spent their entire lives working their land — whether it be in their family for many generations or not — you become so attached to it and all of your effort could be snatched up and paved over as soon as you sell the property,” he said.
What an easement costs
The trouble is money. Development restrictions can cut a property’s value by as much as 65 percent, depending on location, nearby building pressure and how strict the easement is. An appraiser looks for the highest dollar. “They call it ‘best use’ in the industry,” Wright said, and farming, he added, “is probably considered the worst use.”
Washington does offer help. Twelve years ago Congress expanded a program known as ACEP-ALE, setting aside about $450 million a year, now $650 million, to pay owners for part of the lost value. The money passes through land trusts, state and local agencies and tribal governments, which in effect buy the development rights.
Eric Gramlich, who works with Ozark Land Trust, says even those payments rarely compete with what a developer will pay. “The financial means, even for willing landowners, that’s a big challenge for them,” he said. More than 1 million acres have been preserved under the program since 2014, but more than half sits in Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. Missouri has none. Illinois has 445 acres, Iowa 2,320. Gramlich blames the small number of land trusts in Missouri and a farm community still learning the option exists.
Two farmers, one calculation
Rick Mareske grows berries and practices forest farming on 40 acres on the north side of Kansas City, Kansas, and sells through a CSA subscription. He and his wife looked at an easement and backed off. “The cons are, it’s expensive,” he said. “It’s like $20,000, $25,000 just to do it, and then you lose money.” The land is his retirement income.
Kuebler went through with it. He puts his own cost at about $20,000, mostly for the survey and appraisal. He skipped the federal program, even though his fields, forest and pasture lost about $90,000 in value once the development rights were gone. Last year he sold to another local farmer. The easement requires that the land stay in agriculture and that growing methods be sustainable or regenerative. One more clause lets him keep using the small old cabin and the land until he dies.
He no longer sells at the market, but he goes every Saturday to buy his groceries. “I see them, and we talk, and it’s like I really didn’t lose my community,” he said.
Sources
- The Best Restaurants in Saratoga Springs, NY | The Adventurist
- Aging farmers and the government want to save farms, but for many the cost is too high
- Lifeway Foods® to Report Third Quarter 2026 Results on November 12, 2026
Photo: runda choo / Unsplash (Unsplash License)
