Governments throughout the Nation have programs to encourage the continuation of farming and the maintenance of land in an agricultural use. These programs date to the 1950s and evolved out of concern about excessive or untimely conversions of productive farmland to irreversible developed uses. State and local governments have wide authority to intervene in the decisions owners make on the use of their famland. Regulatory approaches, however, have low political viability in the farm community. To deal with those political realities, farmland protection programs have emphasized voluntary, incentive-based approaches. First-generation efforts centered on state enabling legislation for reduced, or use-balue, assessments on farm real estate. Today, all 50 states have programs that give direct cash benefits to farmland owners with a lower annual property tax bill (Tremblay, et al., 1987)