Fair game: County’s annual celebration reminds farmers of their changing prospects

Jeffrey Libby

Wednesday, April 10, 2002 | 11:04 a.m.

LOGANDALE -- In this town where 10-year-olds discuss the difficulties of show pigs sunburning and Eagle Scouts spent spring break welding hitching posts at the fair grounds, even the wide, wet fields of alfalfa and all the newborn livestock suckling in the shade can't obscure another heady scent Las Vegans know well.

"The money," said 12-year-old Austin Eide, his grin wide, his face freckled, sitting in mud-spattered boots and jeans on his ATV. He was gazing over a field his family has farmed for four generations. Money is what Eide smells coming. The Clark County Fair and Rodeo, which runs Thursday through Sunday, could mean as much as a $4,200 take for him when he auctions Petey Two, a steer he took on loan from his grandfather in September.

Eide and 230 other children around Clark and Nye counties spent last fall and winter raising steer, lambs, pigs and goats to compete in the livestock show before the auction where the future farmers will see their work pay off.

But for the veteran farmers of Logandale as elsewhere in the county, and there are about 200 of them -- cash-poor and land-rich like most in their business -- payday often comes only with the sale of their farms.

The same acre that brings about $1,000 for alfalfa -- the staple crop today in the Moapa Valley -- sells for as much as $50,000 on the housing market, longtime Realtor and rancher Doug Barlow said.

"The prices are so expensive anymore you can't afford to farm it," Barlow said. "Once you get over $1,500 an acre, it's hard to make the ground pay."

The county fair is a celebration of American agriculture, but residents of Logandale, the county's main agricultural community, see the role of farms diminishing as the Las Vegas Valley expands into surrounding rural areas.

As the 38,000 Las Vegans expected to attend the fair drive along the two-lane main drag through town, passing small homes and trailer homes on plots of alfalfa, playgrounds next to corrals of horses and the occasional ranchette mansion shrouded in imported palms, they'll see real estate signs with prices only city money can buy. The high prices are the seeds of a Las Vegas bedroom community taking root, residents and real estate agents said.

Anyone who isn't already farming in the area won't be farming, farmers say, and many who have farmed for several generations -- including Eide's grandfather Glen Hardy -- are slowly selling off land and lucrative water rights to Las Vegas developers, who in turn are building suburban homes and streets. The same thing is happening in other rural towns such as Mesquite and Pahrump. But most agree that it will be a long time, even decades, before farmers here run into complaints from neighbors about earthy smells the way Robert Combs does at his North Las Vegas pig farm. It will be a long time before the fair loses either its piquancy or its pungency.

For now, children here grow up on ATVs, many of them handling $50,000 in farm equipment by the time they're 8 years old. Las Vegas remains a faraway place where they have shopped or traveled to for a family visit.

Eide, for instance, has spent the past seven months working on his yearling every day, breaking him, leading him on a halter and carefully fattening him up -- from 800 pounds to about 1,200 pounds by show day.

"And in between I've been irrigating and cutting hay. I'm going to go bale here in a while," Eide said.

The big question for Eide, who attends Grant M. Bowler Elementary, is whether he'll win the Grand Champion purple ribbon. "It means you're the best," he said.

Logandale saw its best in the 1940s and 1950s, supplying cantaloupes, radishes, onions and other crops to Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. New technology and stricter health standards forced farmers to rely less on migrant labor and shift to grains and alfalfa by the 1960s, Glen Hardy said.

By the 1970s developers were converting farmland to homes, Barlow said. Many of the homes sold to firefighters, nurses and others who worked long but flexible hours in Las Vegas and could manage the commute. Most homes, then as now, were ranchettes or homes on 2 1/2-acre lots. There is no tract housing.

But the balance of the community is shifting away from its rural past.

Farm acreage in Clark County may have remained fairly stable between 1987 and 1997, the most recent figures available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture -- at about 70,000 acres. But Martin Owens, a state statistician with Nevada Agricultural Statistics Service, said much of that acreage includes land that has been developed with large-lot homes that allow horses and so is still categorized as farmland.

More telling, Owens said, is harvested cropland. Between 1992 and 1997, cropland dropped 38 percent on the county's 200 farms, from 5,470 acres to 3,406. Most farmers expect the 2002 farm census to show the trend has continued.

Unlike other nearby rural areas such as Bunkerville, Mesquite, and Pahrump, however, farmers in Logandale and neighboring Overton appear to have been handing farmland over for homes at a slow pace. For one thing, all of Logandale still relies on septic systems, which helps limit both density and growth. Logandale has also opted not to adopt the same Las Vegas gambling base that has helped speed development in rural Mesquite and Pahrump.

In Logandale and Overton, the combined population has increased at a steady 3 percent each year over the last decade, rising from 4,200 people in 1991 to 6,000 last year. Most of the development has been in Logandale, Barlow said, and the majority has been built on former farmland.

In the same time period, Bunkerville jumped from 248 people to 1,158 and Mesquite's population grew from 1,800 to more than 12,000. In Nye County, where Pahrump is the only town to experience a population explosion, farmland plummeted -- from 370,000 acres in 1987 to 85,534 acres in 1997.

Pahrump farmer Tim Hafen, 70, a perennial presence at the Clark County Fair, farmed cotton on 1,500 acres through the 1970s. When cotton tanked on the world market, he switched to alfalfa, a less profitable crop, and in 1996, he subdivided the first lot of 265 acres for homes.

"After having farmed here 51 years, it's kind of sad, but it's a fact of life. The residential demand in Las Vegas is so great," Hafen said. "We'll eventually eat the rest of the farm up. But that's where the final payday comes for a hell of a lot of farms."

Hardy's 30 acres of alfalfa in Logandale overlook another 30 acres of homes built about 10 years ago on land sold by a relative.

His son Stan Hardy, a Clark County firefighter, lives next door in a nearly identical brick house. Six years ago, when he added on to the house, he put the kitchen in the back because of increased traffic along Moapa Valley Boulevard, the town's main drag.

"But we love it here," Stan said. "Those of us who have been here a long time are way less opposed to the growth than the people who just moved here."

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