E-I-E-I-0H: Airport farming out land

DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) - No one will ever mistake Dayton International Airport for a quaint family farm, but an agreement approved Wednesday by city commissioners will allow a company to continue to grow crops on airport land.

The move will bring more than $150,000 a year for the city and that's not all.

"By having that land farmed we're putting it into a productive use," says Aviation Director Terrence Slaybaugh. "We don't have to incur any costs of maintaining that property."

But farming is just the beginning because the airport has thousands of acres of land that were designed as a noise-barrier of sorts.

"We purchased a lot of land for noise mitigation to try to protect the area around the airport so we wouldn't have residential housing and other conflicting uses," Slaybaugh says.

But now the planes aren't as loud, so the Federal Aviation Administration is pushing the airport to find other uses for that land to help pay back the federal money used to buy it.

"They have a process now where they want us to dispose of it and recoup those monies," Slaybaugh says.

That's why you'll see crops in the fields around the airport this spring, but with the edict to get rid of that land, they might not be the only things growing there in the future.