When I was young, maybe 6 years old, I recall climbing up a long-retired rusted Minneapolis-Moline tractor at McCray’s Farm in South Hadley, Mass. There, lost in youthful imagination, I envisioned puttering down guess rows in the old tractor’s seat, its diesel motor puffing smoke.
At one point, the Connecticut River Valley of northern Connecticut, western Massachusetts and southern Vermont produced nearly all the nation's premium cigar tobacco. Our nutrient-rich glacial soil and humid summers made it optimal for growing the broadleaf variety.
For a century, these cash crops were the region’s primary economic engine. High school students like my grandmother grew up picking tobacco.
A lot has changed since then.
Sure, I understand that New England is a very far cry in its agricultural output to the Midwest and other American production powerhouse regions.
I’d venture that most might dismiss its agricultural significance as irrelevant. Moot. Immaterial. And they’d be right.
But that’s the point.
In the post-Revolutionary period, my home region flourished with intensive, small-scale farming that boasted some of the highest yields per acre in the nation. It was on the nation’s agricultural output map.
But things changed quickly when vast farmland tracts opened in the Midwest and West for a fraction of the cost, devouring its wheat crop dominance and pushing New England farmers to grow specialty crops instead.
Even when I was young, some 30-odd years ago, rolling farmland graced the landscape with a pastoral aura. Manure’s familiar aroma hit like a tsunami on the other side of the Calvin Coolidge bridge.
Now, the stench of exhaust pours through open windows, and parking lots cover the watermelon patches I stole fruit from as a kid. Commercial development and urban sprawl have swallowed up much of the open space.
It’s a cautionary tale about the way that industry can shift quickly when economic conditions change, and land becomes valued more for other purposes.
About two-thirds of Massachusetts’s previously numbered 30,000 dairy farms have closed in my lifetime. New England has lost 80% of its farmland in the last half-century. Today, towns like Whately and Hatfield still grow premium broadleaf tobacco for high-end cigar wraps, but on far less acreage.
In writing this “Paved Over” series, I’ve been struck by the similarities between what happened in Yankee territory many years ago and what is happening now in the Midwest and beyond, especially in farming communities proximate to population centers. The culprit has evolved into today’s highly global and technologically driven industry, but the conditions feel similar to me.
In my reporting, dozens of farmers from all over the country have echoed the same sentiment: Farmland’s developmental value is outpacing that of its cropland productivity. It’s a modern-day Space Race, but the prize is a supercomputer, and the playing field spans rural America.
I fear that farmland is becoming a casualty in America’s unrelenting pursuit of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency dominance.
Fifty years back, New York’s Hudson Valley faced a similar predicament when IBM moved into town. Over decades, the region’s political leaders and ag advocates crafted policies and laws to protect its remaining farms.
Others should take notice of their trailblazing efforts and consider enacting similar protectionary measures in their own communities. Today, tech companies like Meta and Microsoft are pushing their infrastructure into traditional agricultural regions like Central Ohio, Texas, California and Oregon’s Columbia River Basin.
Still time for some
The good news is that there’s still time for many communities to decide what they want their neighborhoods to look like for next year’s farming families. Actions taken today will reverberate through generations.
When I visit the quaint and quiet New England villages near my childhood home, which are so familiar to me, I drive past a glut of rusted farm machines rotting in overgrown fields. Most will never turn over and cough with black smoke again.
If they’re lucky, some will be lovingly restored as an attraction that brings children joy. The majority will sink into the mud. These days, small farms mostly sell specialty crops directly to consumers through community-supported agriculture and local grocery store chains because land is too expensive to justify commercialized agricultural production.
As farmland values hold steady at an all-time high throughout the country, modern technology is bringing similar pressure to other regions’ doorsteps — albeit on a global scale. Technological innovations like solar energy production and artificial intelligence (with its necessary data center infrastructure and accompanying suburban sprawl) are ramping up development pressure on rural towns and townships that have never had to consider what a Walmart might look like at the blinking yellow light.
America must protect its farmland and the farmers who grow food on that land through protective policies, favorable trade negotiations, infrastructural investments, agricultural support initiatives and incentive programs that treat farmers as fairly as the developers who are paving over their land one acre at a time.
Otherwise, leftover farm equipment will bleach in the sun long after sectors of America’s agricultural industry have moved to other, more favorable countries, where overhead costs hang low and cheap farmland stretches into an endless horizon.