Farmland Assessments
Section 306 of Pennsylvania Act 100 (Farmlands, December 7, 1979) mandates that studies be performed and determinations be made before agricultural lands can be condemned for transportation purposes. PennDOT's Agricultural Resource Evaluation Process is a series of tasks including internal administrative activities, data collection, and assessment of impacts on individual farm operations, including their business viability, avoidance and minimization measures for potential impacts, documentation of findings in a Farmlands Assessment Report (FAR), and presentation of the findings to the Agricultural Lands Condemnation Approval Board (ALCAB) with a request to condemn farmlands for transportation use. Skelly and Loy has prepared more FAR reports and conducted more ALCAB presentations than any other Pennsylvania consulting firm. We have successfully facilitated multiple PennDOT projects through the farmland assessment process to not only minimize adverse impacts to important farming communities and individual operations but also to obtain ALCAB determinations that permit important transportation improvement projects to move forward. In addition to Farmland Assessments performed for PennDOT projects, Skelly and Loy was contracted by the New York State Department of Transportation to perform a Farmland Protection Analysis for a roadway improvement project in the state of New York. This study required the collection and documentation of the agricultural resources that were present within the project study area.
Subservices:
Farmland AssessmentsSection 4(f) Evaluations
NEPA Documentation
Indirect And Cumulative Effects (ICE) Analysis
