The reminders come in the mail, by phone and on foot. Just about everybody — developers and real estate agents alike — wants a chance to snare the 200 acres in Baden-Brandywine that have been in the Pirner family for almost a century.
Hedy Pirner’s answer has been the same to them all.
“I would like to see it be a farm,” Pirner said. “I’m not interested in having the place developed.”
The Prince George’s County Council will vote today whether to approve the 81-year-old woman’s wishes. It is the last step before Pirner’s request to have two parcels granted as agricultural preservation districts goes before the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation’s Board of Trustees meeting on June 27.
An official with the Prince George’s Soil Conservation District said Pirner’s petitions show a change in how local and state government treat agricultural land.
“It’s nice that the county’s finally moving to preserve some of this land,” Dave Bourdon said. “If we don’t do it now, another 10 or 15 years down the road, there’s not going to be a whole lot left to save.”
The first Pirners farmed the land in 1914 before handing the farm down to Hedy Pirner’s late husband.
Pirner moved onto the farm in the 1950s when tobacco was the cash crop. But tobacco fell out of favor and none of the couple’s seven children wanted to farm the land, Pirner said. A neighbor has rented the land for the last 20 years to grow corn and soybeans.
“When tobacco was king, everything was different,” Pirner said. “But times change and things are different and you cannot go back to what was.”
If Pirner’s farm becomes a preservation district, Pirner can apply to sell the state development easements to the land anytime in the next five years, Bourdon said. The state generally pays at least 75 percent of what a developer would spend for the land, Bourdon said, and preserves it as farmland forever.
That’s exactly what Pirner wants, she said. The land has been held by Pirners for 92 years and she’d like to stretch that legacy at least a little longer.
“I would like to make it 100,” Pirner said.
