Assignment 3

Chris Mallory

Protagonist: Eliza Furman, a newly graduated veterinarian, inherits the family farm on the outskirts of Omaha. She moves there with her fiancée, Mark, a city boy. Eliza is a very sincere and forthright person and expects others to be the same. A few of the neighboring farms have been sold for development and new houses are springing up around the farm.
Goal: Eliza’s primary goal is to keep the farm intact for her children to inherit someday. She also wants to set up a wildlife rehabilitation center.
Conflict: Encroaching suburbia and rising land values make it almost impossible for Eliza to pay the property taxes. Developers are offering her increasingly larger sums for the land and Mark is pressuring her to sell.
What she’s going to do about it: Eliza and some of the local farmers petition the Nebraska state legislature to pass a law allowing farm trusts (I’m not sure ‘farm trust ‘ is the exact term I want; what I mean by it is a program where, once land has been enrolled in it, that land must be used for agriculture only. It cannot be subdivided and sold off for building purposes and it is taxed at agricultural rates. I know there is something like this in some of the eastern states, but not, as far as I know, here in the Midwest.)