Over the years, Newtown’s boards and commissions have had a rolling epiphany. It started with the conservation and land use agencies, which listed open space preservation and acquisition in the Town Plan of Conservation and Development. It moved to the administrative and finance agencies, which supported bonding initiatives for open space acquisition. And now the cause of open space preservation has been taken up by a local agency whose middle name is development — the Economic Development Commission.

Late last month, the EDC presented a revised Strategic Plan to the Legislative Council that explicitly supports the preservation, promotion, and expansion of agricultural and equestrian industries in Newtown. It is not like farming and animal husbandry are new concepts in the community’s economic history. These enterprises were how most people made money in Newtown in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Only in the second half of the 20th Century did the town turn away from that heritage to concentrate on developing commercial and industrial areas, and more significantly, to building houses and carving up open spaces as a source of private business revenue.

This progression follows the ever-evolving answer to the question entrepreneurs of every generation ask themselves: What do people want to buy with their money? And Newtown has developed accordingly. Increasingly, as Newtown has grown more affluent, people are finding that it is not only more stuff and bigger houses that people want. There are other quality-of-life components that are becoming increasingly rare, and consequently more valuable in modern communities: open spaces and rural experiences. That means a community that still has crops in the bottomlands, livestock in the pastures, and places where people can experience those things as consumers just as they did two and three hundred years ago is a very desirable and, hence, marketable community.

With its epiphany complete, Newtown is now receiving recognition as an enlightened town from the US Department of Agriculture. Specifically, the USDA is impressed with Newtown’s efforts to combine passive recreational and active commercial uses of its open agricultural lands to enhance the quality of life and economic well being of the community.

If Newtown plays its cards right, combining its efforts to secure open lands through the purchase of development rights and to encourage and promote commercial agricultural activities through its land use regulations, this federal recognition may be followed by federal grants to help underwrite the costs of these initiatives. Finally, everyone is beginning to see our agricultural heritage as something more than a nostalgic footnote to history. It just may be the linchpin of our economic future.