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Ohio’s successes with farmland preservation will be one of the highlights of the seventh annual Ohio Farmland Preservation Summit.

The summit will be held Nov. 2 from 8:15 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Ohio Department of Agriculture in Reynoldsburg. The goal of the meeting is to bring together farmers, landowners, local officials, residents and various agency personnel to discuss the status of farmland preservation in Ohio.

"The purpose is to give everybody the opportunity to get an assessment of last year’s activities as far as preserving farmland and share ideas of new ways to preserve farmland," said Chris Henney, OFBF’s director of policy development. "It’s always been well attended."

Sponsors of the event are the Ohio Department of Agriculture, American Farmland Trust (AFT), Ohio Farm Bureau, Ohio State University’s C. William Swank Program in Rural-Urban Policy and Center for Farmland Policy Innovation.

Keynote speaker is Ralph Grossi, AFT’s president, who also will talk about his organization’s perspective on the next farm bill, according to AFT.

In the morning, panelists will highlight a local farmland protection funding technique, local foods program, creative annexation agreement and voluntary zoning in support of agriculture. The morning session also includes a review of other initiatives statewide. The morning panelists are Bob Barcus, development director for Tecumseh Land Trust; Howard Sacks, a sociology professor and director of the Rural Life Center at Kenyon College, and Jim McConnell, a Pittsfield Township trustee in Lorain County.

The afternoon session features a panel of experts from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. They are Bob Wagner, AFT’s managing director for field programs; Wallace Lippincott, manager of the Agricultural Land Preservation Program in Baltimore County, Md., and Matt Knepper, director of the Lancaster County Agricultural Preserve Board in Pennsylvania.

After the summit, a roundtable will be held from 3:45 p.m. to 5 p.m. It will allow people to ask questions of the experts from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

The cost is $40 per person. For more information, see OFBF’s Web site, www.ofbf.org, and click on Feature Links.