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Conserving Hoosier agriculture, protecting Homestead Farm families

Writer's picture: Robb GreeneRobb Greene

This article originally ran in The Daily Journal on January 28, 2025.

Anarchist author Michael Malice once quipped that conservatism is just progressivism driving the speed limit. It’s an observation that has long shaped my own political views, as it seems even when Republicans control the levers of power, progressivism continues to progress – albeit slower and legally.


It grieves me that the word “conservative” has seemingly lost all denotative meaning within right-of-center politics. If you don’t believe me, just ask many “Conservative Republican” elected officials to explain what it is they specifically want to conserve. Most will parrot neoliberal tenets about low taxes, or some vague notion of traditional values, both of which I agree with, but few can articulate a specific thing.


For me, my problem isn’t naming specifics, it’s narrowing them to a manageable list. However, in my role representing rural Shelby and Johnson counties, there is one resource to which I have devoted my conservative attention: land.


In 2023, I had the privilege of voting for the Inventory of Lost Farmland Bill. It tasked the Indiana State Department of Agriculture with quantifying the loss of productive agricultural land since 2010. When the report was released last summer, it revealed that we had lost 345,682 acres. Since numbers do not always adequately convey scale, that is roughly equivalent to 1.7 Hoosier National Forests. Now that we know the scope of the problem, it is incumbent upon conservatives to begin enacting common sense policies to conserve this precious resource, particularly given our proximity to Marion County. One such proposal that I am putting forth this legislative session is House Bill 1265, which focuses on the families within the agricultural preservation movement – the Hoosier Homestead Farm.


Began in 1976, the Hoosier Homestead Award Program has bestowed more than 6,000 awards to families who have proven an unbroken familial chain of title to their farm through the program’s centennial, sesquicentennial, and bicentennial awards. If you ever have the privilege to attend the annual Homestead Awards ceremony at the Indiana State Fair, you will see first-hand just how meaningful this honor is to the families involved. It’s more than a metal sign to hang on the side of a barn – it’s a symbol of generational grit. Families conduct deep research to assemble the necessary documentation required to establish the provenance of their farm, a process no less stringent than proving one’s bona fides for the Mayflower Society.


My bill would take this program, which I was shocked to learn only existed at the administrative level, and put it into state code. This necessary step enables the second, and more important part of the bill, which gives these families a voice to remonstrate against the use of eminent domain upon their Homestead Farm.


Since filing the bill, my legislative inbox has received numerous emails from families around the state who have shared heart-wrenching stories of one-sided fights with utility companies and local bodies that sought, and often succeeded, at condemning their family’s heritage farm. One was even from a former state president of the Indiana Farm Bureau who lost his family’s centennial farm through economic development condemnation. If the head of the largest agriculture group in the nation’s 10th largest agricultural state couldn’t stop his own farm from being condemned, who could?


House Bill 1265 does not touch the issue of easements, leases, voluntary sales, or the good-faith negotiations that do lead to a deal between the family and the condemning entity. Rather, when families reach an impasse in negotiations, or they outright do not want to sell their family’s birthright, this bill triggers a process that entitles them to a public hearing at their respective local legislative body. In most instances, this is their county board of commissioners.


Enabling homestead families to move these deals out from the shadows and into a local, public meeting not only gives them their day in court, so to speak, but it provides a check on the often-unmindful use of eminent domain. To put it another way, House Bill 1265 seeks to balance competing views of time – the public projects that are too often bound by expediency, against a multi-generational family farm that in many ways is not.


Returning to my original lament over the etymological drift, conservatives would do well to remember that the Latin root of conservative is servare, which conveys the idea of maintaining something in its original state. For these families who have literally invested generations into their land, I believe this proposal is conservative in the truest sense.

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