Matt Bayzick named his farm Lair del Falco after he saw hawks flying overhead. Now, it will stay farmland for generations to come.
The name’s Italian. Bayzick said it means “home of the hawks, home of the farms.” It came to him as he searched for housing inspiration.
“My wife and I, we didn’t know what we wanted to build, [we were] talking about it. And we were in Italy and we were going over a mountain…and my wife looked up and said, ‘That’s the house I want.’ And that’s what we did, took a picture of it, and that’s what we built,” said Bayzick.
They bought the land for Lair del Falco, or LDF Holdings Farm, in 2005. It’s a corn and soybean farm, and Bayzick wants to keep it that way. He wanted to reserve the land for agricultural use, so he got an easement on his farm from the Luzerne County Farmland Preservation Program.
“If you ever saw [the farm], not to be too sentimental about it, you would say, ‘Why would you want to change it?’ It’s almost like a sin,” said Bayzick.
Easements make it illegal for future developers or owners to use the land for anything other than agricultural use. Counties, conservation districts and the state team up to buy property from farmers, but keep landownership in the farmer’s name. Bayzick got $211,887 for his farm. His application was approved 16 years after he applied in 2008.
That is not unusual.
Counties have limited funds to spend on easements, according to Matthew Jones, executive director of the county’s planning and zoning department. The county pays the easement’s upfront costs before being compensated by the state’s Department of Agriculture.
However, farms can beat each other out for an easement. Jennifer Lauri runs the preservation program for the county’s conservation district. She said they use a ranking system. The more existing preserved land around a farm the better its chance at approval. The district wants to preserve as much consecutive land as possible.
“As more farms get preserved, that’ll increase the applications around it. So, like he was surrounded by already preserved farms. So, that increased his score over time,” said Lauri.
LDF is the Luzerne County Conservation District’s 38th preserved farm. They preserved 64 acres of land on Thursday for a combined 900 acres with surrounding farmland.
The farm’s co-owner, Chris Bayzick, said he outbid a developer who wanted to build a subdivision on every ten acres of land.
Matthew Jones from the county’s planning department said what that land would have otherwise been if the Bayzicks' had not stepped in.
“That would have been six McMansions instead of a working corn and soybean farm,” said Jones.
For more information on Luzerne County’s Farmland Preservation Program, visit its website.
