By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON

Arundel Newspapers Staff Writer

“The clock is running. We must move, and move positively” if Virginia’s farmlands and its agricultural industry are to be preserved, warned Dr. R. Michael Chandler, VPI extension specialist for community development.

The Commonwealth’s population climbed 71 percent between 1950 and and 1986, Chandler told the audience at last Wednesday’s spring meeting of the Virginia Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts. “That has not occured without a price,” he noted, adding that the cost has been particularly high in the farming communities which lie on the fringes of rapidly growing Northern Virginia. He pointed to Loudoun County as an example: since 1950, the county’s population has swelled by 200 percent, going from 40 to 123 persons per square mile. And as the overall population went up 200 percent, Loudoun’s rural farm population dropped 79 percent, while land traditionally used for food and fiber production was developed into subdivisions and shopping malls.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the state, Southside agricultural communities have lost 80 percent of their farmers in the last 35 years while experiencing virtually no growth in overall population, Chandler reported. And the population of farming communities is growing older at a faster rate than urban populations, he added.

Nineteen of Virginia’s 21 counties which have 40 percent or more of their area classified as prime agricultural land are either in the state’s urban crescent of substantial growth or the pockets of substantial population decline, according to the extension specialist. In either case, the future of farming is imperiled. “The urban corridor is losing land, and the rural areas are losing people . . . It’s difficult to farm land if you have to