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Farm numbers
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BLACKSBURG - Although the recession may be a major contributing factor to the increase of farm numbers in seven states last year, it apparently has had little impact in Virginia.
James Pease, Virginia Cooperative Extension agricultural economist at Virginia Tech, said there may have been a slight increase last year in the number of small farms in Virginia but that current information does not show it.
“The large majority of farms in the state are judged to be small. These numbers do not show any increase,” he said.
Jim Lawson, deputy state statistician for the Virginia Agricultural Statistics Service in Richmond, agrees with Pease. He estimated that about 65 percent of Virginia’s farms have sales in the $1,000$10,000 range and 92 percent have sales less than $100,000.
The net average income per farm last year was $10,607, down more than $1,200 from the previous year. The number of farms in Virginia is 45,000, said Lawson. The number has been declining by almost 1,000 a year since 1986.
This is different story than found in neighboring Tennessee, which experienced an increase of 1,000 farms. All of these were listed as small farms, with sales less than $10,000 a year.
Although the total number of Virginia operations has declined, farm size continues to increase. Ten years ago, the average operation in Virginia was 163 acres while the current listing is 198 acres.
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