GoKawiilCredits HennyGe Wichers is a writer and researcher based in London. Her work traces the friction between technology and human society.
Each summer, just 30 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., the hills around Kingsbury’s Orchard sit lush and green as the first peaches of the season ripen to a golden-red blush. The air is heavy with the smell of fruit sugar, damp earth and dewy grass. At first light, Gene Kingsbury, who manages the farm with his sister Sue Ketron, moves along the rows of trees, running a hand across the fuzzy globes that bear his family name.
He first spotted the variety in the late 1990s on one of his trees. It was a natural mutation. From the few buds that caught his eye, he grafted two experimental trees, then propagated 200 more. Today, the tangy-sweet Kingsbury Pride peach ripens each August in Upper Montgomery County — a reminder that even century-old traditions rely on change by design.
The orchard along Peach Tree Road has been in the family since 1907, surviving wars, economic downturns and the long suburban march of Washington, D.C. But by the late 20th century, that legacy was in doubt — not because of a bad harvest, but a crisis of incentives. Several relatives co-owned the farm. Some wanted to cash out; others wanted to keep growing fruit even as the city encroached, Kingsbury recalled.
It’s a familiar arithmetic on the urban fringe: Farmland can suddenly be worth more than anything it grows because developers will pay for space to build. That’s often the moment communities fracture, too — preservationists go up against developers, farmers against town planners. The story typically ends in a courtroom.
But what saved the orchard was an unusual set of rules. In 1980, Montgomery County planners had created what they called the Agricultural Reserve: a 93,000-acre expanse of farmland stretching along the Potomac River, protected not by fences or subsidies but by a new kind of property right: Transferable Development Rights, or TDRs.
Landowners inside the Reserve were assigned one TDR for every five acres. They could use these rights to build on their own land or sell them to developers who wanted to add density — build more homes than otherwise allowed — in designated growth zones, miles away.
The idea gave farmers the option to raise funds without sacrificing productive land, and developers more room to build where schools, roads and sewers already existed. “We probably would have lost the farm back in the 1990s without the opportunity to sell the TDRs,” Kingsbury told me. The sale allowed relatives to “reap some monetary benefits,” giving Gene’s mother time to eventually buy them out. The Kingsburys sold their rights, not their land, and the transaction kept the farm intact — and the peaches still growing.
What happened on the Kingsbury farm looks, from the outside, like just another planning rule. But in practice, it does something subtler: it turns binary divides into a cooperative market by simply rewriting the economic incentives.
It worked. More than four decades later, the Reserve still covers almost a third of Montgomery County’s land. Its TDR market has enabled 70,000 acres to remain farmland — all via private transactions. The area’s more than 500 working farms help sustain rural livelihoods within just 25 miles of the nation’s capital.
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