Читать книгу A Small Town Love Story: Colonial Beach, Virginia - Sherryl Woods - Страница 13

THE FAMILY FARM

When I was very young, there was nothing I loved more than taking a day trip from Colonial Beach down to Iona, a farm owned by my great-uncle less than an hour away in Mount Holly. It wasn’t just the history of the farm, where my great-grandmother and grandmother had once lived and near where my mother was born, it was the long tree-lined driveway and the herd of black Angus cattle grazing in the fields that appealed to me.

In 2012, according to the Census of Agriculture, there were still 212 family farms and a total of just over 59,000 acres of farmland in Westmoreland County surrounding Colonial Beach. That number has decreased through the years. It was down 11 percent just since the 2007 census. A few had under ten acres. Only twenty had a thousand acres of more. Most fell somewhere in between.

The farms raise not just cattle and vegetables, but fruits and tobacco, and produce cows’ milk and eggs, and even offer Christmas trees along with various crops for grains.

The Martin family farm, where Mildred Grigsby grew up, represents a lifestyle that is slowly fading.