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County Agriculture Policy 6 requires visitor serving and retail use and facilities in agricultural areas to be incidental and secondary to a primary agricultural use.
In order to verify that sites proposing to develop a visitor use have a primary agricultural use, and that the visitor use is secondary and incidental to the agricultural use, the Agriculture Department is proposing the following thresholds: |
A variety of alternative approaches have also been considered. A memo that includes various approaches can be found here. |
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| 1. VERIFICATION OF PRIMARY AGRICULTURAL USE. A minimum acreage of agricultural use must be located on the site of the proposed visitor use: |
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- 2 acres of nursery/greenhouse production.
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- 5 acres of permanent irrigated crops (trees/vines).
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- 10 acres of annual irrigated crops.
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- 40 acres of irrigated pasture* or dry-farmed perennial crops harvested annually.
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- 100 acres of dry-farmed crops harvested annually.
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- 300 acres actively grazed to a commercial standard.
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- approved agricultural processing use.
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| 2. INCIDENTAL DETERMINATION. The area devoted to the visitor use may not exceed |
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- 5% of the area devoted to the agricultural use.
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- When the agricultural use is less than 10 acres in size, the visitor use may be up to 10% of the area devoted to the visitor use.
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- When the agricultural use is an approved agriculutral processing use, the visitor use area may not exceed the area devoted to processing.
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- In no case may the visitor use area exceed 5 acres.
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| *Irrigated pastures is land which supports livestock used for the production of food or fiber and which has an annual carrying capacity equivalent to at least one animal unit per acre as defined by United States Department of Agriculture (from CA Gov't Code 51201). |
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