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pected two counties such as Fauquier, whose planning documents are full of rhetoric about preserving ajgriculture and a rural way of life, to have played a more forceful role in efforts to get agricultural district legislation adopted in Virginia. It’s certainly worth a try, but local elective officials and local delegates to the state legislature often sound as if they’d never even heard about this possible avenue of farmer relief, much less be prepared to vigorously press for it.
THE same thing can be said for purchase of development rights, as well. Loudoun County has been particularly full of talk about this suggestion, but aside from commissioning a study, little has been done to push the idea toward some actual applications.
Saving valuable farmland from being swallowed up by non productive uses is surely an “idea whose time has come” in the United States, a country once blessed (or cursed, it might be said) by seemingly limitless land to exploit and abuse. Single croppers at one time could drain their acres dry, and then move off the exhausted soil to start all over somewhere else. No more; the land prices “somewhere else” are as likely to be too high for economical farming as the ones he fled.
There is no place to run to; we’ve got to start using, and preserving, what we have.O
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