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GIBSONVILLE — With cattle milling about and a crisp wind rustling toward the house from a distant pasture, Larry Gerringer's farm has a timeless, bucolic feel to it.

The farm has been in his family for 60 years. He's on the job shortly after 4 every morning to start milking in the outbuilding nearby. The meadow outside remains much as it has for generations.

"A real estate agent would love to have that big field and put houses on it," he says of his dairy farm, one of eight left in a county that once had many times that. "We want to keep it in grass."

But tranquil and secure though it may seem, Gerringer's 300-acre farm is at the center of a contentious debate over whether and how Guilford County should help preserve its working farms.

Advocates for protecting open space in Guilford want to pay Gerringer $500,000 in county bond money so that his land will remain a farm forever.

Critics say it amounts to tossing away tax money for a questionable benefit.

"I think it's a bad idea," says Guilford County Commissioner Melvin "Skip" Alston. "It's irresponsible to give away taxpayer money without any public access to the land or any other public benefit."

But supporters see the move, which would be matched by $500,000 from the state, as the only way to stem a tide of residential and commercial development that could sweep away all or most of Guilford's remaining farms.

"It might be hard to see a direct benefit from this in the next five to 10 years," said Kirk Perkins, chairman of the county commissioners. "But I think as we get more and more urbanized, it's going to become increasingly important for us to have these farms."

Twice in the past two months, the commissioners shot down the proposal to buy a "conservation easement" from Gerringer and his wife Jackie, the last time by a margin of 6-5 with fellow Democrats Alston on one side and Perkins on the other.

Gerringer and his family are peeved at harvesting only controversy from what they see as a win-win for them and the public.

"I'm not going to beg for nothing," said Gerringer, who figures the plan would have cost him and his descendants $1.5 million in potential development income. "The county commissioners just couldn't realize what we were giving up."

The family offered to surrender that future windfall because they love the land and want to keep farming it, said Anna Amoriello, the Gerringers' daughter and business partner.

"Our commitment is that we take care of the land in the best possible way because it is feeding us," she said.

Supporters of farm-preservation efforts don't understand how government officials could reject a plan to preserve the region's dwindling farm heritage but justify millions of dollars in incentives to wealthy companies for industrial projects that trigger huge amounts of additional public spending — new roads and utility lines, for example.

The proposed easement on the Gerringer farm is part of a strategy developed by the county's Open Space Committee, which advises Guilford government on how to spend $10 million in bonds that voters approved in 2004 to preserve large parcels of undeveloped land.

The purchase for a total of $1 million would be carried out in partnership with the state Department of Agriculture, steward of $8 million that the General Assembly allotted this year for such farmland preservation efforts.

Guilford's committee, appointed by the commissioners, sees conservation easements as an important technique to make sure the county ends up with a good balance of park land and working farms.

Other than buying land outright for public use, such easements are the only reliable way to preserve large pieces of land, said Jack Jezorek, a veteran member of the committee.

"We're hobbling on one leg if we can't use conservation easements," Jezorek said.

Although Gerringer's farm would remain private property, the easement provides county residents with all the environmental benefits of an outright purchase, from improving air quality to replenishing ground water and flood protection, Jezorek said.

Gerringer and his family would continue owning the land, working it, profiting from it and paying taxes on it. But they could use it only for farming and only in a way that protects the environment; for example, fencing streams to prevent cows from causing erosion and pollution.

Taxpayers would buy the Gerringers' right to profit from their land for residential or commercial development, a ban that carries over to their heirs and to any future buyer.

The technique is a well-established way of helping farm families get additional income from their land for expansion or retirement but keeping it in family ownership as a working farm, said Gerry Cohn of Hills­borough, who works for the American Farmland Trust.

"It's most effective in a region where there is development pressure but still a viable farm community," said Cohn, whose group promotes efforts to save the nation's vanishing agricultural landscape. "If there's a Wal-Mart across the street, it's too late."

Farmland easements are common in areas more dependent on agriculture for tourism or as an economic force, places such as Lancaster County, Pa., known for its Pennsylvania Dutch culture. In North Carolina, Forsyth, Orange and Buncombe counties have used the technique effectively.

But Alston, along with a majority of the Guilford commissioners, questions whether conservation easements are a suitable use of public money. Taxpayers should receive something tangible when public money is spent on property, he argues.

Republican Commissioner Linda Shaw shares that view, saying that it seems wrong to use public money to buy someone's freedom to do what they or their successors wish with their property.

"I'm all for farms and open space, but I'm also for property rights," Shaw said.

Shaw said that if more information surfaces and it is persuasive, she could change her mind. But there are key pieces in the proposal that nobody has addressed; for example, why and how this particular farm was chosen among all those in the county, she said.

In recent interviews, several other commissioners raised questions about a possible conflict of interest. Larry Gerringer is a first cousin of state Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler's wife. The Troxlers own a farm near Browns Summit.

Troxler said he would play no role in deciding whether the project wins the matching money from the state government, without which the deal falls apart.

It is among more than 50 farms and other agricultural ventures competing for a piece of the state's $8 million fund for farmland preservation.

Projects will be screened by other state officials who use standardized forms to score the competitors and they won't play favorites, Troxler said.

Jezorek said he didn't know about the family relationship and doubts that anyone else on the Open Space Committee did, either.

But he acknowledges that the committee did not communicate effectively with the commissioners, mistakenly thinking that conservation easements were generally well understood and unlikely to be controversial.

One important factor in selecting the Gerringer farm was its location on Buffalo Creek, offering a chance to protect that stream from the additional pollution that surely would follow any sort of development, Jezorek said.

And it's in an area that's still largely rural with other substantial farmland nearby, enough that it might be possible to eventually assemble a protected zone of hundreds more acres, he said.

The Gerringer farm also is an excellent example of the kind of working farm the committee hopes to perpetuate, Jezorek and other members of the committee say.

The farm has been a dairy since 1949, but the Gerringers also grew tobacco. In recent years, they switched to making specialty cheeses and have developed a thriving business selling to North Carolina's growing Hispanic population.

Using several thousand gallons of milk a week, they produce three types of cheese — queso fresca, panela and ricotta — under the brand name Tia Anna's.

They sell to "tiendas," groceries that cater to Latino residents, as well as to other stores throughout North Carolina and parts of Virginia.

"We were surprised at how fast we grew," said Jackie Gerringer. "We were able to create our own market."

Committee members say they did not haphazardly select the Gerringer farm for Guilford's first conservation easement, but invested a lot of time in careful consideration.

They hope they can revive the project before this summer, when officials in Raleigh decide which projects get some of that $8 million in conservation money.

To bring the proposal back to life, one of the six commissioners who voted against the project last month would have to request a rehearing.

Toward that end, the committee hopes to get some time during a board briefing session to field questions and explain in detail why it thinks conservation easements are a good deal for taxpayers.

Even if the commissioners change their vote, Gerringer's conservation easement is not a done deal. It still would have to compete this summer for the required state matching money. Officials in Raleigh have received $29 million in requests.

Meanwhile, farmland is biting the dust, left and right, on the rural outskirts of Guilford and the state's other rapidly urbanizing counties.

Larry Gerringer has watched the city creep ever closer to his enclave on High Rock Road for years now. These days, it troubles him to remember how things were when he started farming, when farms were abundant.

"It's nothing like that today. And 50 years from now, who's to say what you'll have to do to make a living as a farmer," Gerringer says. "Fifty years from now, you might not be able to find 10 farms in all of Guilford County."

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or at taft.wireback@news-record.com