More and more, Virginia farmers are feeding world

A plow etches the dark soil of the Tidewater – an age-old act that ripples around the world.

Four hundred years after tobacco sprouted at Jamestown and bailed out the foundering colony, agriculture remains the backbone of Virginia. Few industries can touch its economic impact – a $55 billion engine stoking 350,000 jobs – or its far-flung reach.

Last year, nearly $2.4 billion worth of homegrown products was exported around the globe – a record for Virginia agribusiness and proof that, despite urban sprawl and warp-speed lives, farming is far from dead.

So far, in fact, that Gov. Bob McDonnell is gambling on Virginia’s oldest occupation to save the day again. New trade agreements are cracking doors to dozens of markets, places ripe for the kind of business that can help heal a recession hangover.

So, while schools clamored for money and potholes proliferated, $500,000 was squeezed from last year’s state budget to hire trade reps in China and India, where they’re hawking everything from Suffolk peanuts to Albemarle County apples.

Next, McDonnell wants “eyes and ears on the ground” in Eastern Europe, North Africa and Central America, says Todd Haymore, state secretary of agriculture and forestry:

The wheat whispers, the dry rustle of countless bristled heads bowing to the afternoon breeze.

The reverence is not lost on Flanagan, although he probably wouldn’t use that word. There are too many farmers in his DNA to permit such fanciful notions.

Flanagan, 37, is at least the fourth generation. He only knows: “I like being out here, in the field.”

There’s no time for reflection anyway. On this afternoon, Flanagan is the only agricultural extension agent on the job for miles around.

Extension agents are the industry’s middle link, the go-to for farmers who need help battling mysterious beetles or navigating bureaucracy. They also serve as an “extension” of the state’s agricultural institutions, a conduit for research conducted at schools like Virginia Tech.

Any locality with a hint of rural wants its own agent, but not all can swing the $40,000 or so annual salary, even with the state kicking in a share. Suffolk – with 70,000-some acres in farmland, the most of any city in South Hampton Roads – has gone without an agent for two years.

Neighboring agents try to fill gaps, but this spring, when back surgery took out Chesapeake’s extension agent, Flanagan – hired by Virginia Beach just a few months ago – found himself spread plenty thin:

“I’m still new, so I’m trying to say ‘yes’ to everyone. I guess I’ll have to get over that.”

Tall, lanky, wearing a ball cap and faded jeans, Flanagan is cast for the part. He has a college degree in agriculture and tills the same Pungo soil his great-grandfather did over a century ago. His parents and sister’s family live in houses next to his. Jeannie, his wife, runs their produce stand. Their five children know 4-H better than cable TV. And women are always addressed as “ma’am.”

He took the extension job because the home farm just can’t cover the growing family’s bills, much less the needed benefits. Moments like this, walking through 120 acres of thigh-high winter wheat off Centerville Turnpike, compensate for the desk work.

“I’m not much for paper pushing,” he says, fingers trailing along rasping tips as he pushes through the crop he’s been asked to diagnose. To the uninitiated, the wheat looks lush, but the practiced eye recognizes the uneven, reedy growth of a “thin stand.”

The farmer who planted this plot last fall is at a loss. So much can go wrong, especially when the timeless enemies, like bugs, weather and disease, are aggravated by new twists, like chemical resistance and climate change.

Flanagan points to the mud that’s sucking at the soles of his work boots. The grower rents this field, a common industry practice, and Flanagan isn’t familiar with its crop history. But he does know that two painful years of drought have lured some farmers onto land that’s never been right for wheat before.

“Wheat doesn’t like wet feet,” he explains. “So when you finally get a lot of rain, like we did this spring, you can be in trouble.”

With a dozen soil types and terrain that runs from mountains to sea, geography molds Virginia’s agriculture. Pasture dominates in the west, where the ground is long on rock, short on topsoil, and the slopes aren’t suitable for row crops’ massive machinery. Grain farms lie closer to the coast, where soil is enriched by the watershed and huge harvesters can straddle the level land.

In these parts, the breadbasket is a bastion of corrugated fields on the Eastern Shore, Suffolk, lower Chesapeake and below Virginia Beach’s Green Line, an urban growth boundary intended to safeguard the rural character of the southern part of the city. Cropland is under siege across the state, capped in asphalt or lost to development at the rate of 100,000 acres a year.

Working to offset its loss: modern science. Cross-breeding, genetic tinkering and chemical advances are conjuring better yields – a doubling of U.S. productivity over the past 50 years.

“Without that technology, we wouldn’t be feeding ourselves,” Flanagan says, “much less half of the world, like we are now.”

True, the nation’s signature farms lie in the Midwest – Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska – with their endless amber waves of grain. But Virginia farmland has a storied legacy. The grand homes of the Colonial landscape vouch for its historic fertility.

Now, silver grain tanks signal the major operators – the 50 or so outfits that helped Virginia Beach produce almost 2 million bushels of wheat, soybeans and corn last year. Harvests in Chesapeake and Suffolk were at least twice that.

And yet, despite its size and impact, agriculture blends into the background – such a routine part of the view that it’s barely noticed.

“I was giving a talk at a school the other day,” Flanagan says, “and the kids were asking things like, ‘Where do farmers sleep? What do farmers eat?’ People don’t really seem to know where their food comes from anymore.”