Acres and Vast Tracts of Land

I always thought that an acre was a square 220 feet per side, but I just looked it up and it’s 208.71 feet per side. The total square footage of an acre is 43,560, and I thought it would be interesting to know how they came up with that figure. An acre turns out to be 10 square chain (not a unit I remember), 160 square rods, or 100,000 square links, assumedly of the chain. The strange thing is that none of those sums that has a nice square root, so it appears that the standard acre was a late unit extrapolated from chains or rods, rather than a standard plot somewhere measured in them. An acre is just over four tenths of a hectare and there are just over 640 acres in a square mile. Anybody who can measure their property in square miles has vast tracts of land, but even then, they usually talk in acres because it sounds like more.

When looking for property in the country, I want acres, not a fraction of an acre, and to some extent, it doesn’t impact the overall price that much in the areas that I’m looking. In urban environments, the land is sometimes worth more than the structure, but rural communities often have strict requirements for development, based on road frontage or minimum acreage. An obvious advantage of a large property for building is it gives you more flexibility in siting the house, in terms proximity to neighbors and locating an area that perks properly for the leach field. Incidentally, Word doesn’t have the word “siting” in the default dictionary, which I suppose shows how few people own enough land to play with it.

My initial dream was to by an old farm, something on the order of 40 acres or a multiple there-of, as olden farmers used to buy their neighbors out in hard times or marry them in good times. The traditional New England farm always included a timber lot, in addition to cultivated fields and grazing for livestock. If you’ve driven through New England and seen all of the beautiful dry-laid stone walls, I’ve been told that many of them aren’t as old as they look. Most farmers would end up with stone walls from clearing rocks out of their fields, but the carefully built ones may belong to a later era of cheap immigrant Irish labor in the 1800’s.

The only farming I’ve ever been involved in was on Kibbutz in Israel, but my understanding of what happened to New England farms is that the railroads finished them off a long, long time ago. It’s simply cheaper to grow food in California, Florida, and just about every other state in the Union that can be irrigated, because the growing seasons are longer, the sun is brighter, the soil is better and the land is flatter and less rocky. Consequently, there are a few dairy farms left in New England, and some cold climate orchards and bogs, but a lot of the farms you see are specialty organic or gentlemen’s (i.e., not for profit) farms. When you take an area that was nearly probably 90% farmland and 10% forest over a hundred years ago, and start removing the farms, you end up with a lot of forest, and some vacation homes.

Twenty ago, a friend of mine from work bought the top of a mountain in VT for $200 per acre. It had been largely logged out, so there were no large native trees left standing, but nature recovers quickly (if you don’t mind Eastern White Pines) and it was a beautiful location. I should have bought then, but I didn’t have the money and hadn’t grown disillusioned of the city life yet. I suspect it sells for much more than $200 an acre today, but the only reason for that would be that the trees are well on their way to having commercial value again. The problem, from the standpoint of somebody wanting to sell land in the Northern Kingdom of Vermont, or Northern New Hampshire for that matter, is that very few people really want to move there. There’s a certain amount of work based on tourism and logging, but it’s not a magnet for industries that require a higher population density from which to draw employees or to sell goods and services. Consequently, if you want to move that far north, you can buy a big farm with a house and a barn for something in $100,000 neighborhood. The same goes for Northern New York State. Unfortunately, my geographical range is limited to the Southern parts of New Hampshire and Vermont, plus Western Massachusetts, where if you can find such a property, the price is more likely above $200,000.

I’m not an English Lord who requires vast tracts of land for tenant farmers to support the London lifestyle. I just want my privacy. My farming ambitions are limited to root vegetables and some salad stuff in the summer, and a small house with a wood stove would suit me just fine, as long as there’s no trouble with the town getting a certificate of occupancy (CO). I don’t know if Vermont and New Hampshire even require inspections, but Massachusetts is too progressive to allow its citizens to live in a hole in the ground, unless the hole is under a house with a CO.

One of the downsides of living in the country that I’ve learned from my six year apprenticeship in country construction is driveway maintenance. You can’t expect to hand shovel or snow blow a driveway that stretches for hundreds of yards, and if it’s on a hill, rainfall erosion is a serious challenge. I’m not crazy about buying a plow truck, even a junker can be an expensive proposition to maintain, though if I kept it on the property, I could get away with registration and insurance. That’s why so many country homes are set so near the road, making you wonder, “if they wanted to life in the middle of nowhere for privacy, why did they put the house less than a hundred feet from the road. Well, we can’t all live in vacation homes, and the house was sited close to the road so they could get to work and get the kids to school. I have a lot more flexibility than most people in my commuting needs, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to leverage this to find a good deal on a property that’s not so attractive to a family.