Rural Advocate, Former Calvert County Planning Director Greg Bowen to Keynote MPCA Conference

Bowen on his Calvert County farm

Bowen on his Calvert County farm

Greg Bowen came by his love of the rural life honestly. The fifth-generation Calvert County farmer, who will deliver the keynote address at this week’s Maryland Planning Commissioners Association (MPCA) conference in Solomons, has agriculture in his blood.

Bowen, as he will discuss Friday during his MPCA lunch address, credits successful rural communities with setting the table for successful towns and cities. Sprawl-type growth in agricultural areas can sound the death knell for farming and draw vitality from cities and towns. By contrast, when rural areas thrive, urban and suburban dwellers can live more densely in areas where infrastructure and other resources are concentrated.

It didn’t take long for Bowen to both understand the importance of a strong rural economy and apply strategies to shore it up in his community. He worked on his family’s tobacco farm near Prince Frederick after earning his first degree and soon after assumed a leadership role in the Calvert County Young Farmers organization. His leadership included chairing a committee set up by then-County Commissioner Bernie Fowler (later a state senator and founder of the annual Fowler Wade-In) to investigate preservation options, which turned into one of the nation’s first – and most successful – transfer of development rights (TDR) programs.

The ahead-of-its-time preservation program, which allows farmers to sell development rights on their properties to builders who want to increase density when they want to develop in growth areas, as well as an ambitious marketing initiative for farmers transitioning from tobacco, are credited with helping retain southern Maryland agriculture.

Calvert County gained population throughout the 1980s, gaining as much as 7 percent in population each year before it stabilized. A county that once had fewer people than the student population at the University of Maryland, at 20,000 in 1970, jumped to 90,000. Smart land use policies like TDR allowed farmers to sell their development rights to earn enough cash to weather economic downturns and withstand the pressure to sell for development.

“For a long time, farms would be bought out for subdivisions by people migrating from urban areas looking for cheap land and lower taxes, but gradually our preservation programs were very successful,” said Bowen, who was Calvert County’s planning and zoning director for six years and a planner for 26 years before that. “We’ve finally reached the point where we slowed growth. And because of that, farm communities have stabilized.”

Many of the farmers who remained worked with the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission to learn new, more profitable ways to farm, from direct sales of meat to growing grapes to make wine. Bowen served on the commission for five years, helping explore alternative crops that would be as profitable, if not more, than tobacco. He credits SMADC with doing enough research to convince skeptical farmers to change – southern Maryland now has 14 wineries – as well as making farms a destination for tourists.

A stable agricultural sector creates an environment for cities and towns to revitalize. Those areas with the infrastructure and services to support them should be targeted for growth. That premise fuels the recently released Reinvest Maryland: Accelerating Infill, Redevelopment and Community Revitalization report authored by the Maryland Sustainable Growth Commission, of which Bowen is a member.

“For us to preserve the countryside, we have to have towns and cities that are great places, the chosen places to live,” Bowen said. “Rural areas need a sense of hope, with strong economies so they are not the default land use. Smart growth is not only creating vital, interesting towns and cities, it also means we make opportunities happen in rural areas.”

Join dozens of planning commissioners and members of boards of appeal from across Maryland to hear Bowen’s keynote address “Successful Rural Economies: A Key to Prosperous Maryland Towns and Cities” at the 2014 MPCA conference.