> More farmland could be put in preservation, but that requires us to pay more taxes.

A lot of these farms were profitable and don't have to be converted into something else (including more heavily regulated "preserved farms").

I'll give you an example. There was a very controversial warehouse proposal near Kutztown around when COVID started. Whether or not it gets built is an off topic tangent and its not exactly clear what's going to happen there.

But rather than talk about that part I want to talk about why the farmer wants to sell to a warehouse builder in the first place:

It comes down to zoning. The farm has been profitable and stable for hundreds of years at that location, but in recent times it became rezoned as industrial use (against the owner's wishes). Which means a significant property tax hike. Now throw in the farmer wanting to retire, the lack of younger people wanting to be farmers (for various reasons), and its "screw it I'll sell to someone who will actually use it as what its zoned for and cash out/retire."

Now why & how did a multiple-centuries old farm become zoned as industrial in the first place? Harrisburg. Its politics plain and simple. Harrisburg's vision for the future of Pennsylvania's economy in places like Berks, the Lehigh valley, and elsewhere is to attract warehouse jobs. Harrisburg went to the local municipal governments and said hey we're demanding you zone X amount of your territory as industrial to attract these sweet, sweet warehouse jobs [that pay crap, treat their employees like crap, and congest the shit out of our roads]. We don't care if your residents hate it, this is the future we want.

The 81, 78, 33 corridors were heavily pushed towards rezoning with the explicit goal of building these warehouses. Rt-222 isn't by any stretch of the imagination part of this original "vision" but it was collateral damage from shit-policies.

PennDot envisions building a 5 lane highway circle on the east end of Kutztown on Rt222 to accommodate a 300-acre, 4-warehouse mega-facility with no plans to expand the road infrastructure of Rt-222 between there & Allentown due to the delusion that the trucks will never want to travel east (lol). They expect them to go west, hook up with 81, go down to 78, just to cross east towards Allentown & etc.