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No deal: Dickerson family farm will close next month

Lease negotiations with county fall through; Jehovah-Jireh sells its stock

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

A deal to save the farm could not be reached.

In the face of a $2,200 hike from the county in their monthly rent and the absence of an acceptable alternative deal, the family that runs the Jehovah-Jireh Farm in Dickerson has decided to shut down operations and move by the end of August.

The steers have been sold and the latest turkey order has been cancelled. Last week they sold the last of their broilers.

Jehovah-Jireh will not be among the farms featured on the county’s annual farm tour this weekend as it has in year’s past.

The Horst family — Cathy and Myron and their six children — were notified five months ago that the rent for the 25-acre property they have restored and called home for the past eight years would increase from the $100 a month they have been paying since 1998 to $2,300 a month at the end of August.

When they began renting the property on Martinsburg Road, which is owned by the county Division of Solid Waste Services, the house was dilapidated, riddled with buckshot and uninhabitable. Over the years, the Horsts have used their own money to restore the house and barn and operate a small farm that raises chemical-free meat and eggs.

When The Gazette last wrote about the Horst family’s situation in April, county spokeswoman Esther Bowring said officials were working ‘‘to achieve a resolution that is satisfying to the community, the county, and the tenant.”

The Horsts met on May 22 with Agriculture Services Manager Jeremy Criss and the Office of Real Estate’s Bernie Fitzgerald to try and work out a deal.

But a resolution could not be reached.

‘‘We basically feel that they did not want to farm here, and it wasn’t really negotiations,” Cathy Horst said Monday. ‘‘They are going to do what they are going to do.”

Bowring said Monday that the county offered a new deal to the Horst family in May that included stipulations that the family restore buildings on the property in addition to paying $300 a month in rent.

‘‘The property has not been maintained as it should have been,” Bowring said. ‘‘The county purchased the materials to maintain the building. The county offered to keep the rent at $300 a month. It is nowhere near the market rate. The family decided to decline.”

But Horst said that although the county offered the $300 monthly rent, the deal included having the family do $2,000 worth of work each month to maintain the outbuildings. The family said they would have had to submit a list accounting for $2,000 worth of work each month.

According to Bowring, the county was interested in coming up with a sweat-equity lease, but no amount of money was ‘‘cast in stone” for the monthly value of the work.

As for the lack of maintenance work the county claims, Horst said there must have been a misunderstanding of the requirements.

The Horsts thought their responsibility in maintaining the property included cutting the grass, replacing the well and the general upkeep of the area, she said. When they first heard of a rent increase last summer, they were surprised to hear that the Office of Real Estate also expected them to maintain the outbuildings.

The Jehovah-Jireh Farm was known for raising antibiotic-free, chemical-free and hormone-free chickens, turkeys and cows. Next month the farm will close and the family will move out of the house and they are looking for another place to farm, Horst said.

County Councilman Michael J. Knapp (D-Dist. 2) of Germantown said the unfortunate situation was mired by a lack of communication between the two parties. He said that although the original $2,300-a-month proposal hurt relations, from his understanding the $300-a-month offer was more reasonable.

‘‘The relationship between the leasing department and the Horst family was not good,” Knapp said. ‘‘They both decided not to continue. It is unfortunate because the county had a good offer on the table that would have made it productive to farming.”

Horst thinks county negotiators did not give much weight to the letters that representatives from many agriculture groups sent to advocate on behalf of the farm. She said her customers are ‘‘outraged and disgusted” by the entire situation.

‘‘There is such a struggle in the Ag Reserve,” Horst said. ‘‘The community would like to save farms and the farmers can’t save that much money. It forces farms out. While there is talk they want farms, the action is not there.”