The quickening creep of homes across Cache Valley farms must have haunted him, because before he died in 2004, he asked his son to do what he could to preserve what was left. It's a wish shared by most people living on the formerly wide-open grasslands between the snowy Bear River Mountain crags and the juniper-studded Wellsville Range, according to a poll that is propelling a property tax measure toward the county's November ballot.

With help from The Trust for Public Land and a federal grant that partially covered a conservation easement from his seven siblings, Ron Zollinger kept his dad's 48-acre island of dirt and orchards from slipping under urban Utah.

"I realized it's either going to be subdivided and I'm looking for another job, or we try to secure it somehow," he said. The family sold a conservation easement that gave them cash up front but prohibited them from ever subdividing or selling to a developer.

The story is too rare by the quickly evolving standards here in Utah's historic cheese basket. Roughly 11,000 acres of the valley already have permanent protection. But the pace isn't fast enough for residents stalled on U.S. Highway 89 in a metro area of 121,000 that the Census Bureau says is growing by 3,000 a year. Almost three-quarters of valley residents say they want higher taxes to speed the preservation.

The Trust for Public Land and The Nature Conservancy presented those findings last week to a Cache County Council that until now has been reluctant to put such tax measures on the ballot.

The poll of 300 county voters, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies Jan. 29-30, found 71 percent favored a $20 million measure to be repaid over 20 years. The poll has a reported 5.66 percent margin of error.

Agriculture, including food processing, is a billion-dollar annual economy in Cache County, creating 1.65 jobs for every one job on the farm, according to a Utah State University study. Even here in the home of that 23,000-student university, it's good for a third of economic output.

Farmers point out that USU economic reports through the years have shown that where farming is a net tax generator for the county, housing development costs more in services than what it gives back in property taxes - and several hundred acres fall yearly.

Dairy cows are leaving Cache County at nearly the same pace that people are arriving. The countywide herd that exceeded 24,000 a decade ago now numbers fewer than 14,000, according to the federal government's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

The results are most pronounced where U.S. 89's five-lane, 18-mile run from Logan through North Logan and Hyde Park into Smithfield no longer gives up any hint of an edge of town. It's Best Buy after Home Depot after Big Kmart after Wal-Mart after Kohl's.

"It breaks my heart," said Shauna Kerr, state director for The Trust for Public Land and a Cache County native who remembers that stretch as farm country.

The poll shows that most Cache Valley residents of all ages, residency lengths and political persuasions feel the same. Kerr believes their support will overcome the anti-tax movements that blocked statewide action by the Legislature and, in 2004, Utah voters.

"All politics are local, and all passions feel local," she said.

Nonetheless, the potential challenge was evident Tuesday even as the County Council moved toward a ballot measure. Most members said they'll vote in two weeks to put the tax before voters, but Councilman Darrel Gibbons said he'll oppose it. The national economy is faltering and the county has bigger priorities, such as roads, he said.

"I just am not right sure that I can vote and say it's good leadership on my part to put an opportunity to increase taxes in front of the people," he said.

To cover $20 million in county bonds, the annual property tax would increase by about $25 per $100,000 of assessed home value.

The council-appointed Cache County Agriculture Advisory Board has grown frustrated trying to find money, Chairman Joe Fuhriman said. The Utah Legislature has repeatedly declined to allow the use of sales tax. Now there's a critical mass of support for local action. "People are realizing what's happening to our beautiful valley and they want to maintain the lifestyle here - the beauty."

The choices are obvious when viewed from the porch of Fuhriman's ranch house and from fresh asphalt nearby. His 200 working acres are mowed to the nub by cattle, a sheltering blue-green sea. To the east are cottonwoods lining a clear, rushing stream, only partially obscuring clogged traffic on State Route 165 south of Providence. To the west are vinyl-sided model homes on curvy suburban streets.

Farther west is a new elementary school surrounded on one side by cows and a crowing rooster, but on the others by recently cured sidewalks adjacent to empty, waiting lots.

Farmers want to save their land, Fuhriman said, but there's not enough money to pay local matches on state and federal grants.

Zollinger's family donated a quarter of the land's development value to make the match, and neighbors chipped in thousands of dollars to save their views. In all, The Trust for Public Land reported governments and donors amassed nearly $1.5 million for the easement.

Still, unless all eight siblings had agreed to sacrifice what could have been a bigger payday from developers, the farm would have been lost. Zollinger couldn't afford to pay the rest of his family market value for the land where he and his children still grow 13 varieties of apples and press juice for local and regional markets.

To split their inheritance fairly, the family would have had to sell out.

Instead, the newly restricted land is worth only about $4,000 an acre, perhaps 10 times less than its former potential. And Zollinger is branching out. He's now a busy supplier of ornamentals for the front yards that are sprouting all around him.

"That's the biggest part of our business now," he said, taking off his work gloves and gazing at a home with a giant retaining wall above the farm's foothill bench. "We noticed the demand for fruit wasn't as great as for ornamental trees because there's so much development in this valley."