Farms are a common sight for cyclists riding Route 76 across Virginia. Cyclists will observe fields prepared for planting in the spring, the growth of plants over the summer, and the harvest of crops in the fall. Throughout the year, grazing animals, especially cows, may be observed in meadows and forests along the route. Other livestock, including poultry, pigs, and goats, will be clustered closer to farm horses and barns. On rural roads, tractors, harvesters, and other equipment, often with license plates reading “Farm Use Only,” will be encountered by cyclists on a regular basis. Virginia’s farm history extends back more than five hundred years, as crops and livestock were central to Native American household and community practices well before the arrival of Europeans. An exploration of Virginia agriculture along Route 76 illustrates changes in production, distribution, and dissemination, as well as remarkable continuities with the time fifty years ago when Bikecentennial rides rode past many of these same farming communities.
Welcome to episode 8 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the region near Lake Anna, located just under 130 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and about 420 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte.
For centuries, Native Americans cultivated crops along the streams and in the valleys of the Atlantic coastal region. Most of these crops were consumed by local communities, although some agricultural goods were traded with others along footpaths and rivers. Subsidence agriculture was self-sustaining with the goal of producing enough food and products for use by the local community. Crops were rotated in ways that replenished the soil. As communities grew, Native Americans cleared new land, planted additional crops, and continued to farm the land in a sustainable manner.
The first English settlement at Jamestown depended on the knowledge, tools, and seeds obtained from local Native American populations. The food that sustained the English colonies in the first decades was produced in ways learned from indigenous communities, thus providing the expertise in farming techniques essential in this new climate.
A major shift in Virginia agriculture occurred within a few years of English settlement with the cultivation of tobacco for export to European markets. The tobacco grown in Jamestown drew upon Native American cultivation practices as well as seed varieties already grown in the Caribbean for the European market. Over the next century, tobacco cultivation spread across eastern Virginia. Growing tobacco for export enabled the elite of the early English colonies to become very wealthy. Tobacco exports also drove the trade in slaves, as enslaved Africans cultivated the crops that made the English colony prosper.
During the eighteenth century, Virginia’s leading farmers continually experimented with new crops and farming techniques. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both leaders in these efforts to make agriculture more productive and profitable by adapting crops native to the Americas to produce goods for domestic and export markets. Even as they experimented with other crops, however, tobacco remained the most profitable export commodity for the colony in the decades before and after American independence.
For the next three hundred years, tobacco was central to the Virginia economy. Tobacco production peaked in 1981, shortly after the Bikecentennial, at more than 250 million dollars. In the forty years since this peak, tobacco decreased to less than one-third of this amount. Cyclists riding through central and southwestern Virginia are unlikely to see tobacco fields. In major cities and even some towns, however, they are likely to see substantial brick buildings where offices of tobacco companies were located as this industry drove Virginia’s economic development through the early twentieth century.
The Civil War brought other notable changes in Virginia agriculture that shaped subsequent decades of cultivation and community development. Plantations that had previously depended on enslaved labor found new ways to reduce costs and maximize profits. Many emancipated slaves entered into sharecropping arrangements, where they cultivated land owned by former slave owners in exchange for a share of the produce. While this arrangement offered former slaves access to land for cultivation, the terms were usually unfavorable to those working the fields, who often found themselves increasingly in debt to the landowners. This cycle of debt made it difficult for sharecroppers to improve their land or feed their families. For many former slaves, the only way to escape the debt cycle of sharecropping was to leave the land to work in cities. Sharecropping in Virginia thus contributed to the Great Migration of African Americans leaving the south to work in the industrial centers of the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific coast.
In the twentieth century, Virginia agriculture became increasingly diversified. Soybeans and peanuts produced for domestic markets gradually displaced tobacco as the primary crop grown across Virginia. Farms also raised feed for livestock, as poultry, swine, and cattle accounted for substantial shares of the agricultural economy.
A comparison of agricultural data over the previous century indicates how much Virginia agriculture has changed — and remained the same — in the fifty years before and after the Bikecentennial brought cyclists through these rural communities. Virginia currently has just under 40,000 farms and approximately 8 million acres of farmland. This number has been fairly constant for the last three decades. A century ago, by contrast, the 1920 agricultural census revealed nearly 200,000 farms and more than 18 million acres of farmland. In other words, over the previous century, Virginia now has less than one-quarter of the number of farms and one-half as many acres of farmland as a century ago. The Great Depression forced many Virginia families off their farms, as the combination of market collapse and bank failures threatened the viability of small scale farming across the United States. After world war two, agriculture recovered, and contributed to the growth of the American economy in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, farming was an increasingly precarious business, as family farms were unable to compete with industrial scale consolidated farms.
Louisa County followed a similar trajectory, although with one major change distinctive to this region of central Virginia. Louisa County has approximately 500 farms now, with nearly 90,000 acres of designated farmland. A century ago, in 1920, Louisa County reported more than 2000 farms, with 330,000 acres of farmland. The decrease in farming in this central Virginia county has occurred at a different rate than in the state as a whole: Louisa county now has less than one-quarter as many farms (a decrease similar to the rate across Virginia) but just one-quarter as much farmland.
Louisa County lost an unusually large proportion of farmland due to a remarkable, and unusual, industrial development immediately before the Bikecentennial. In the late 1960s, a major electric company purchased nearly twenty thousand acres of land to form a lake needed to provide cooling water for the North Anna Nuclear Generating Station. Over the course of five years, the land was cleared, a dam was built, and Lake Anna was filled. By the time cyclists in the Bikecentennial reached this part of central Virginia in the summer of 1976, Lake Anna’s shoreline extended nearly two hundred miles around nearly 10,000 acres of water.
The number of acres of farmland in Louisa county declined from 138,000 in 1964 to less than 95,000 access just five years later (after the lake was created). The lake was deemed essential to sustain a nuclear reaction which fueled the demand of cities and industry, but at the expense of the region’s farmland. In subsequent decades, of course, the lake became a tourist attraction, but the impact on farming was long lasting.
Two contrasting outcomes of the last fifty years of social change and market forces are also visible in Louisa County and elsewhere in Virginia. Cyclists in rural regions may be struck by the fact that even as they ride past mile after mile of farmland, they rarely encounter grocery stores selling food to the local community. Louisa County, with a current population of more than 40,000 people, has only a dozen or so grocery stories, including a big box store near the highway, several full service grocery stories, and a few convenience or discount stores with limited food options. The Department of Agriculture classifies a rural “food desert” as a location where at least one-third of the population lives ten or more miles from a large grocery store. According to government data, the section of Louisa County near Lake Anna is classified as a food desert because of the considerable distance people must travel to reach a full-service grocery store.
The disappearance of grocery stores is a major trend in rural America over the last fifty years. In 1976, the route map for the Bikecentennial listed at least six grocery stores along the sixty or so miles either direction from Lake Anna. A current map identifies several gas stations with convenience stores and some discount stores, but only two full service grocery stores are located along the same sections of Route 76. While cyclists may note the absence of grocery stores as they search for food and drinks along their route, the implications of this absence are more substantial for those who live in the community. People living in rural food deserts must travel further to access a full service grocery store, with fresh produce and a range of healthy alternatives, or they must adapt their diet to the processed food available at a gas station or discount store that is more accessible.
In contrast to the disappearance of grocery stores, however, the growth and popularity of farmers’ markets and farms selling directly to consumers demonstrates the continued potential for local produce to be distributed to local consumers. The town of Mineral has a farmers’ market selling locally produced goods to community members and outside visitors. Several farms along or near Route 76 and Lake Anna have shops that sell directly to local customers as well as tourists. Given the importance of tourism to Louisa County, particularly as the number of lakefront homes increases, these opportunities for direct sales to consumers are an increasingly important part of the local economy in rural regions.
As cyclists explore other sections of Virginia, they will encounter farmers’ markets in many towns and cities, including Damascus, Wytheville, Christiansburg, Lexington, Fluvanna, Ashland, and many more locations. In addition to providing a destination for fresh food, handmade crafts, and perhaps local entertainment, farmers’ markets make an important contribution to economic and environmental well-being. Farmers’ markets provide employment for farm workers as well as those making and selling crafts and other items. Farmers’ markets are often located in downtown sites, which contributes to the economy of towns that had seen losses in population and commerce. Finally, because many farmers’ markets require goods to be produced within a certain distance, they reduce the transportation distance, and thus fuel consumption, that accounts for much of agriculture’s contribution to global warming. Given the importance of calorie consumption, air quality, and transportation issues to long distance cyclists, these historical relationships between food and farms provide insights into the changing landscape along Route 76.
You have been listening to episode 8 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to the region near Lake Anna, located just over 420 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and about 130 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte. To learn more about the stories in this episode, visit our website or follow us on social media, all accessible for the homepage for this podcast.
