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Page 6 spotlight Michael McGrath farmland preservation report Delaware farmland effort started with a name in a shoebox Michael McGrath 's career as chief of the Delaware farmland preservation program was as accidental as it has been instrumental- his entering government began with someone putting his name in a suggestion box. Here he recalls his years in farming prior to his government career, and the early years of Delaware's farmland effort, which has now preserved more than 76, 000 acres. McGrath was interviewed by phone in late March. FPR: Mike, tell me about how you grew up and where... McGrath: I grew up on a small vegetable farm in southern New Castle County. I had a very interesting childhood. I tell people sometimes, `I'm the only city boy who was raised on a farm'... My dad made his living on the King Street Farmers Market, which is one of the oldest farmers' markets in the United States... my father was a unique character, and had the greatest influence on my life. He was a vegetable farmer from the time he was 11 years old —his father — my grandfather, whom I never knew- was very ill with what would have been called, today, asbestosis. He was a talc miner from upstate New York. My father and his older brother had to make the living for the family. My uncle had heard about the Wilmington Farmers Market, which is a long way from Salisbury, Maryland, where they lived — they took a load of cantaloupes to Wilmington in, I guess, 1921, and found out they could make twice as much as they could wholesale. My father, then, as they grew up and my uncle left the farm — 1927 — dad went on his own to the King Street Market for the first time and from then until 1977 made his living that way. And in 1944 he moved to Delaware to get closer to Wilmington — my dad never plowed up more than five acres in his life and retired comfortably and sent two kids to college. He was interested in having his children be self - reliant, so I started, when I was about 10 years old — he gave me a plot of land and I raised my own crops - to make money, because he said `this is the way you're going to have to pay your way through college.' And so I grew Indian corn and marketed it to a man who ran a roadside stand on Long Island. And he was my customer the whole time I was growing Indian corn — FPR: So you had a true niche market... McGrath: I did... looking back on this it was incredible... when I was six weeks old my mother took me to the market for the first time, and really from then on until I left home I went to the market with them all the time. And looking back now, as a April 2004 planner, I think that has very much informed my view on smart growth and so on ... FPR: Getting back to what your father said, did your entrepreneurial work pay your way through college? McGrath: It did. In fact I had money left over. He was big on finding that niche market - we got good money for things. We grew high quality stuff. In the case of the Indian corn, we bred our own colors — I was selling this stuff by the truckload. But anyway, to answer your question, when I came out of college I had a couple thousand dollars in the bank and actually bought some land... you could actually buy land for a couple thousand dollars then, and it was of course, dirt cheap to go to college — about $1500 a year for room, board, books and everything at the University of Delaware. FPR: What was your major? McGrath: Philosophy. FPR: No kidding .... McGrath: I was a philosophy major. Actually, I finished degree requirements for two majors — philosophy and English literature. And ultimately later I went back and got a degree in accounting. I didn't know much about finances... FPR: You studied philosophy, so you came into farmland preservation probably with some land ethic you had developed ... McGrath: I always joke that if you're going to be in agriculture, you have to be philosophical about it... but just to back up a minute, I think the reason I took the philosophy degree and lots of logic is that by the time I left high school I realized, at least I thought, that what education was all about was not so much about imparting information to somebody as it was teaching you how to learn. FPR: Right — how to think, how to solve problems ... McGrath: But let me tell you about how I got into government, because the land ethic thing wasn't germane until then. We're talking about the early 70s... inflation had just started. Land prices had changed only marginally ... this is where a land ethic or concern about the future of land started to formulate in my mind — during the 1950s and 60s there had been an exodus of farmers from Long Island and Bergen County, NJ, and farmers were moving out because they had lost their land to the expansion of New York City and Long Island and farmers came to settle in South Jersey and in Delaware. There were two things that brought them here. One, they thought this was how far south they had to go, to get away from the city, and two, the soils were very similar to what they had left on Long Island... it became apparent to a lot of farmers in Delaware who had never thought about this before, that land wasn't always going to be there. Because now they had neighbors who were telling them about experiences that were completely foreign to them, stories of 200 acres of houses with little lawns, you know, sort of marching out from New York City and onto Long Island, and there was a lot of money behind this — these guys came to Delaware and, for a while in the 1950s, were bidding against each other for the better farms, and land prices went up. FPR: Because of farmers competing with farmers ... McGrath: Yeah, yeah, for the best farms, you know, they were coming in and then wanted the best farms and they had lots of money in their pockets and I can remember very clearly the local farmers and my dad saying `these people are nuts — they paid $2000 an acre for farmland! ... they're crazy...' I mean that was a lot of money in 1970.