High cost means less farmland

By Carrie J. Sidener
Lynchburg News & Advance
Monday, October 23, 2006


Harold Brown’s old pickup idled roughly at the stoplight at U.S. 460 and New London Road.
Waiting for the light to change, he pointed a finger toward the convenience store on the corner.
“I once made hay where that Sheetz store is,” he said. “A whole era is coming to an end. … We are killing our own future.”
Brown is a kind of farmer that is becoming more common in Central Virginia. He owns some land and rents other tracts, one of which is now for sale in an area poised for growth.
He has a 60-acre piece of land at the border of Campbell and Bedford counties on U.S. 460. That piece he bought from his father. He also works a 70-acre farm that he and his brother amassed, tract by tract, in Campbell County.
He is preparing to leave the tract he rents that is now for sale, near the border of Bedford and Campbell counties along U.S. 460. He fears it soon will become another convenience store or a housing development.
Brown had hoped to buy the farm, but its price tag - at al-most $700,000 for 46 acres - was out of his range. He’ll soon move his 23 cattle from that land and onto the farm he and his brother own.
“It hurts that I couldn’t buy this,” he said. “When I couldn’t, I lost interest.”
He grew up in the New London area and raised his family there. That’s why it bothers him to think of that land potentially changing from cattle pastures to subdivisions.
“I consider this home,” he said.
He hopes that the land he rented from Joyce Abbot will remain a farm.
Abbott hopes that too. Selling was a decision she never wanted to make, but she knew she could no longer stay on the farm that had been in her family since 1939.
She spent her childhood there and returned to it in 1990 when her husband George retired from his job as a cooperative exten-sion agent. The couple didn’t work the farm, renting it to other farmers.
He died of a heart attack nine years later.
“Here we were in the country with no close neighbors,” Abbott said. “It was by the grace of God that I was able to stay seven more years.”
She stayed on the farm until last year, when she slipped and fell near the driveway into a ditch. The fall scared her.
“I did not hurt myself, really,” Abbott said. “It just made me think. God was telling me it was time to leave the farm.”
She sold the farm in July, but the new owner from Pennsylvania put it almost immediately back on the market. Abbott now lives in a Roanoke retirement community in a cottage that abuts a farm. She said that makes it feel more like home.
She also keeps pictures on the wall - aerial shots of the old farm the way she wants to remember it.
“It was just God’s time,” Abbott said. “I don’t regret it. I had real peace with it.”
Brown turned his truck down the driveway at Abbott’s old homestead, driving past the end and up to a metal fence sur-rounding a large pasture. In the bed of his pickup was a small bale of hay and a bucket of feed.
He opened the gate into what appeared to be a field absent of animals. He dumped the food into a trough near a small barn, then grabbed the bale of hay and began to scatter it.
That’s when the cows began to appear, picking up mouthfuls of hay and tossing it about while they crowded around the farmer.
Brown’s family was faced with a decision similar to the one Abbott had to make when she sold her farm.
His father decided it was time to retire after 50 years of farm-ing, setting up a choice of selling the farm, renting it or having a family member work it.
Renting or selling the farm didn’t seem viable.
“He let me have the farm if I farmed it,” said Brown, who was working as a fabricator at the time. “I liked the job I had. It was lucrative, stable, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I wasn’t forced to do it (buy the farm), but it seemed like a natural progression.”
Realizing all the family in-come from the farm is risky. That’s why his wife’s job as a teacher helps ease that concern, Brown said.
“We live quite high on her salary,” he joked.
Scott Baker, cooperative extension agent for Bedford County, said most farmers end up with a collection of family property and parcels they rent in order to have enough land to make a profit.
“Most every farmer I know of has some land they own but they rent additional property,” Baker said. “Land can be rented for a reasonable amount of money. But I need to know if I will have that land for longer than a year.”
Brown said his father was upset when he put the first black Angus cow in with his father’s original herd of red Hereford cows. He now tends to more than 100 beef cattle, as well as corn and wheat used to feed the herd.
Brown doesn’t like the word development. He thinks it puts a positive spin on something that is destroying a way of life.
“We need to come up with a better word,” Brown said. “Developing suggests that you are improving the land. In general, farmers do not adhere to that being a positive. We refrain from using it. We call them opportunists.”
Brown said most people view housing developments as pro-gress. He doesn’t. He views them as overtaxed roads, longer emer-gency response times and higher taxes to pay for new schools.
“At times it seems like these guys are the enemy,” Brown said. “We’ve got two different perspectives on what constitutes improvement and what doesn’t. You can’t complain if you sell off the land.”
Brown’s grandfather pur-chased some of the family land in 1919 and his father bought more in 1948 for $250 an acre - about three times the value of land in the area.
Now land in New London is running close to $10,000 an acre, or more.
“Most people have simply lost their minds to pay that much for land,” Brown said. “Do you know what our cash crop is? Our cash crop now is Yankees.”
Brown said he doesn’t blame his fellow farmers for selling their land. It’s difficult work with little profit.
“I’ve rented out about $5 million worth of land,” he said. “It’s simply impossible to buy now.”
The family farm used to be structured with the father as the chief executive officer, the mother as the executive vice president and the children as the rank and file, Brown said. That structure can rarely be found today.
“What we have almost doesn’t exist any more,” Brown said. “But that’s sad. When a family farm falls - that’s the end of an era. That piece of history ceases to exist.”