On October 10, 2025, a corn and soybean farm outside Laurel, in Sussex County, Delaware, hosted a state announcement that most passersby would have missed. The Delaware Agricultural Lands Preservation Foundation unveiled its 29th round of easement selections: 36 properties, more than 2,800 acres, purchased development rights totaling $14.9 million. The host site, the Oliphant Farm, spans more than 100 acres, has grown corn and soybeans for its current owners across more than five generations, and its oldest building dates to the 1880s.
The setting was chosen, and the setting was the point.
A permanent agricultural easement is not a sale of land. It is a sale of the right to turn that land into something other than a farm. Once signed, the deed carries the restriction forward through every future owner, in perpetuity.
What the Oliphant Farm actually represents
The oldest structure on the Oliphant property, according to the state’s announcement, dates to the 1880s. For context: the decade Chester A. Arthur was in the White House, the decade the Brooklyn Bridge opened, roughly forty years before the first commercial radio broadcast. The family has grown corn and soybeans there for more than five generations. The easement on the farm was half paid with Sussex County funds.
Sussex County contributed $1,917,156 toward eight easements in this round. New Castle County contributed $225,769 for one. Kent County put in $100,000 for seven. The rest came from the state through the Foundation.
Since Delaware’s program began accepting easements in 1996, more than 1,250 farms and more than 160,000 acres have been permanently preserved. Delaware is a small state. Its land area is 1,948.55 square miles, or roughly 1.25 million acres. The preserved farmland now amounts to something on the order of one acre in every eight.
How the program actually works
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is not what most people assume when they hear the phrase “farmland preservation.”
The Foundation does not buy the farm. It buys the development rights. The farmer keeps the land, keeps farming it, keeps the right to sell it, keeps the right to pass it to children. What the farmer gives up, permanently and irrevocably, is the option to convert the property to housing, retail, warehousing, or any non-agricultural use.
Landowners first enroll voluntarily in a 10-year preservation district. The year after enrollment, they become eligible to submit an offer for permanent preservation. The Foundation ranks offers using what the state calls an impartial discounted ranking system, one the department says maximizes taxpayer benefits.
The chronology is specific. The General Assembly passed the framework legislation in 1991. The first funding was allocated in 1995. The first easement selections were made in 1996. The 2025 announcement was the 29th such round.
Eligibility is specific too. The property must be zoned agricultural and free of any major subdivision plan. It must clear a minimum score of 170 on the state’s Land Evaluation and Site Assessment scale, which weighs soil productivity, current land use, and the agricultural infrastructure on and around the farm. It must be working farmland with at least $1,000 in annual agricultural sales and, generally, at least 10 acres of cropland. Farms of 200 acres or more constitute a district on their own; smaller farms can enter if they sit within three miles of an existing one. The effect of those last two rules is to push preserved properties into contiguous blocks rather than scattered islands.
Why the appraisals are climbing
Easement payments are now significantly higher than they were five to ten years ago. Jimmy Kroon, chief of planning for the Delaware Department of Agriculture, told the state announcement that rising farmland values are driving up easement appraisals, and that the program is now paying “at least double what we may have paid five to 10 years ago.”
That has two effects that pull in opposite directions. Higher appraisals give landowners a stronger financial reason to enroll, because the check for the development rights is larger. Higher appraisals also mean each protected acre costs the Foundation more, so a fixed budget preserves fewer acres than it did a decade ago.
The $14.9 million spent in 2025 covered more than 2,800 acres. That works out to roughly $5,300 per acre for the development rights alone, on land the farmer continues to own and farm.
What preservation does not solve
An easement locks the land into agricultural use. It does not guarantee the farm remains profitable, or that the next generation wants to farm, or that commodity prices will support the operation. It does not protect against drought, disease, or the slow attrition of the rural workforce.
Delaware has already recognized part of that gap. A 2026 study in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, by researchers at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop and American Farmland Trust, examines Delaware and Maryland as the two states that extended their easement-purchase programs into land access, lending at zero interest to help young and beginning farmers buy farmland and protect it at the same time. The survey covered farmers who enrolled between 2011 and 2023. The finding worth holding onto is the coupling itself: an easement holds the land in agriculture, but it does not by itself put a farmer on it.
Federal support adds another layer of uncertainty. The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service runs the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, whose Agricultural Land Easements component works through partners that include state and local governments. Payments under that program were among the USDA funding streams frozen during 2025, tracked in Grist’s running guide to USDA funding disruptions. State-level programs that have historically leaned on federal match dollars are navigating that uncertainty in real time.
What the numbers say about the pace
Twenty-nine rounds. More than 1,250 farms. More than 160,000 acres. Averaged out, the program has preserved roughly 43 farms and about 5,500 acres per year over three decades. The 2025 round, at 36 properties and just over 2,800 acres, sits below that long-run average on both measures, and much further below on acreage than on property count. The pattern reflects rising per-acre costs more than declining commitment.
Sussex County, in southern Delaware, remains the center of gravity for agriculture in the state. It accounts for the bulk of this year’s county funding and what Sussex County Council President Douglas B. Hudson, quoted in the state announcement, described as the largest contribution the county government has ever made to the program.
Coverage from CoastTV noted the geographic spread: easements in all three Delaware counties, with Sussex carrying the largest share of both farms and dollars. The interactive dashboard maintained by the Department of Agriculture, described in earlier reporting from Delaware Public Media, lets any resident see which parcels have been protected and when.
What five generations actually looks like
The 1880s building on the Oliphant property predates the gasoline tractor, rural electrification, and the paved county road. The soybean was barely grown commercially in the United States until the 1920s. Corn hybrids that transformed yields did not arrive until the 1930s. A working farm that has stayed in one family across those transitions has already survived the mechanization of American agriculture, the Dust Bowl, the postwar consolidation of farmland into fewer and larger holdings, and the collapse of family-scale operations across most of the eastern seaboard.
The easement signed in this round is designed to run past the current generation, past the next, and past everyone whose name is currently on any deed in Sussex County. It is a legal instrument built to outlive the people who signed it.
Applications and eligibility information are available through the Department of Agriculture at de.gov/aglands.
A few miles inland from Laurel, the corn is already down and the soybean fields are turning. The 1880s building is still standing. The next round of selections will be the 30th.