[M II A II R II K]

The Goat Lady vs. Goliath


June 6, 2010

By Barbara Mahany



Read More: http://www.chicagotribune.com/featur...306,full.story

- If this parcel of paradise doesn't stand to be steamrolled should Urbana City Hall complete a ring road that has been on and off the books for the last half-century. This is no mere saga of a few endangered farms. Nor simply a wail for the loss of 85 acres of the world's richest farmland. This boils down to a battle for urban-fringe farming in a nation just beginning to shift its focus away from decades-old sprawl and toward the preservation of land for local food sourcing. And it extends beyond this college metropolis.

- Two lanes of asphalt, penciled straight through a field of alfalfa, are the least of it. The road, called Olympian Drive and already partway there (it dead-ends in a cornfield not a mile and a quarter away), comes with a price tag of at least $30 million, depending when shovels sink into soil. The project had been shelved for some 13 years, until last summer when the scent of stimulus funds swept through the air, like hay from a hayloft.

- The three-mile span would hitch up the ends of a ring around Champaign and Urbana. And it would cut in half the alfalfa field that feeds the Prairie Fruits goats, roll right past the patch of the farm where long tables are set for sumptuous feasts and bulldoze the bucolia that is the heart of the heartland. "They'll destroy it in essence," says Cooperband, looking out through rows of Winesap apple trees to where the road would run. "People who come out here are stunned that this beauty exists here."

Leslie Cooperband, 50, checks on goats herds grazing on her farm located on the edge of Champaign on Tuesday, May 4, 2010. The Prairie Fruit Farm & Creamery is bordering a proposed roadway, a project opposed by local farmers. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune / May 2, 2010)