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From the Charleston Gazette

January 07, 2007

A farm forever

Lincoln County joins effort to prevent loss of farmland to encroaching development.

By Tara Tuckwiller
Staff writer

ALUM CREEK — The strip mall lights started advancing toward Midnight Farms about 15 years ago.
      “See that tower flashing?” In the twilight, Scott Smith points across the shorn backs of his sheep, through the big back window of the darkened barn, to the ridge where two bright, white lights disturb the dusk. “That’s only been there a week.”
      Charleston’s sprawling suburbs prompted neighboring Lincoln County last week to do what 17 other counties have already done: start a Voluntary Farmland Protection program.
      Under the program, farmers can protect their land from development — housing subdivisions, Wal-Marts and the like — forever.
      Farmers sometimes sell to developers because they can’t afford not to, thanks to competition from cheap foreign food, natural disasters and other problems. Farmland protection pays the farmers to keep farming: An appraiser figures out how much a developer would pay for the land, subtracts how much it’s worth as a farm, and money from a real estate transfer fee pays the farmer the difference. Farmers participate only if they want to.
      Some farmers don’t take any money. When he’s not shearing, feeding, clearing and fencing, Smith is a family doctor, and his father, Loren — “the farmhand,” as he calls himself with a smile — is a retired family doctor who is now the Lincoln County public health officer.
      Before the Lincoln County farmland program got started, they had begun working through another organization, the West Virginia Land Trust, to preserve Midnight Farms. It has been a finalist for West Virginia Conservation Farm of the Year.
      “We must avoid using prime farmland merely for housing development,” Loren Smith said. He echoed state and federal agriculture officials, who have been sounding the alarm about America’s disappearing farmland.
      Development gobbled up an area the size of Maryland, Delaware and Rhode Island combined in five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found in 2003.
      West Virginia alone lost more than enough cropland to cover Monongalia County. And the best farmland is disappearing fastest, the USDA found.
      The nation’s food supply is being concentrated on fewer and fewer corporate farms, further and further from the population centers of the Eastern U.S.
      “That’s not the way to go for the biosecurity of food,” Scott Smith said. Agriculture officials are warning the U.S. needs “small farms, spread out all over the place, so the whole food supply can’t be contaminated all at once.”
      “When we came out here” in 1981, Betty Smith said, “there was one dusk-to-dawn light. Period.”
      Smith, Scott’s mother, points it out from the kitchen window of the elder Smiths’ farmhouse, further up the ridge from Scott’s family farmhouse and the two new blinking tower lights that flash constantly over it.
      Now, “there’s Southridge,” she says, pointing to the gap where the Corridor G four-lane was carved out of the mountain 15 years back. “There’s Yeager Airport.”
      Water lines are coming, Loren Smith said, which means housing developments for Charleston commuters will come. That’s how West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle became a bedroom community for Washington, D.C., flattening half of its orchards in 10 years.
      Six years ago, the state Legislature declared agriculture a “life support” industry and set up the Voluntary Farmland Protection program, allowing counties to fund it with a real estate transfer fee of $1.10 per $500. The counties, in turn, have drawn down nearly $7 million in federal matching money. Other states are now following West Virginia’s lead.
      It is a simple way for counties to support a major industry, said the USDA’s Pat Bowen, program manager for state farmland protection.
      In West Virginia, agriculture accounted for more than $450 million in cash receipts last year. And each agriculture dollar circulates in the local community six to nine times, Bowen said.
      As the sun sets on Midnight Farms, Scott Smith drives up the long lane in his pickup, after a day of seeing patients, and starts to work again. Last week it was shearing, next week lambing. His “employees,” he says, consist of two huge, gentle Great Pyrenees dogs that have never lost a single sheep to the coyotes that threaten the 165 acres, and two 8-week-old pups that are learning the trade.
      Smith and his wife, Polly, have two daughters, ages 6 and 8. Maybe they’ll farm someday, “if they want to,” Smith said. If they do, the farm will still be there.
      For information about the program, visit www.wvfarmlandprotection.org. To contact staff writer Tara Tuckwiller call 348-5189.