Tea Lane Farm in Chilmark will get a new lease on life following the special town meeting this week, when voters swiftly approved a plan to create a long-term arrangement for a farmer to take over the fifty-acre property that has been a landmark at the corner of Middle Road and Tea Lane for as long as anyone can remember.

It was not easy getting to yes on this project, and the town has seen numerous false starts as it tried to craft a plan that kept the farm in active agriculture without being a burden to taxpayers. Now town leaders think they’ve got it right, and on Monday night voters readily agreed to let the selectmen lease the farm for seventy-five years for a dollar. The town will contribute one hundred thousand dollars from its Community Preservation Act fund to jump-start a renovation project on the eighteenth-century farmhouse, which by the last estimate needed half a million dollars to make it habitable. Once a tenant is chosen, a separate lease agreement will be executed between the new farm tenant and the land bank, which owns the forty-eight acres surrounding the farmhouse. The farmer will be responsible for the cost of rehabbing the house and bringing the farm into the twenty-first century by working the land.

Lease terms are still being worked out by the selectmen, but with some forty letters of interest already in hand, there’s good reason to believe the town will find a solid tenant to take over the farm.

To be sure, whomever is awarded the lease will need to make a significant investment in the property, and it’s hard to imagine that farming alone will generate enough revenue to sustain its upkeep. Nonetheless, we applaud the town of Chilmark for finding a creative way to save Tea Lane Farm. And we’re heartened to see a model that attempts to convert fallow farmland on the Vineyard to active agriculture.

Small farming on the Vineyard has seen a minirenaissance in recent years, aided by the national grow local movement. However, the preservation of small farms continues to be an uphill struggle when placed in the context of sky-high real estate values on the Island. We are reminded of the words of Jon Previant, executive director of the Farm Institute, at a meeting last year of a coalition that is still trying to put a plan together to buy Thimble Farm. To grow local, you’ve got to have local dirt, he said.

We’ll be watching with interest to see what can be done with this fifty acres of good Chilmark dirt.