Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 10 · column 4 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
Northern Virginia,
West Of Blue Ridge
Have Most Cattle ^
Your best chance of finding a farm with cattle or calves is to go to northern Virginia and/or to that area commonly referred to as “west of the Blue Ridge."
A survey, conducted by J. D. Johnson, agricultural economist at VPI Experiment Station in cooperation with the Virginia Division of Markets and the Virginia Crop Reporting Service, showed that nearly onehalf of the farms with cattle inventories in 1951 were located in those two areas-northem and west of the Blue Ridge. Further, about 70 percent of the stake’s cattle population was on farms in those areas. ' tfltoFmatidh on livestock inventories, marketing practices, production practices, and pasture production and management, was gathered on 7,000 farms in 47 counties during the survey.
The findings are not surprising, Johnson says, when you remember that much of the land can only,be used for pasture, hay and forage crops, or forests.
An expansion of livestock and grass is taking place in other areas of the state, even though the process may seem slow to some. Johnson says there are several plusible reasons why farmers in eastern and southeastern Virginia have not fully embraced the cattle-pasture program:
A large part of the cleared land is suitable for row-cropping, with less danger from surface erosion than in the mountainous areas.
It is hard to change immediately the viewpoint of a row-crop farmer who has fought grass as an arch enemy all his life. “Fortunately, our educational efforts are succeeding in correcting this erroneous concept of grass,” Johnson says. -—.In
those areas where cattle produc
68.2%