Vegetable Crop Farming in West Virginia

West Virginia Vegetable Crop Farming

From the Article by S. Thomas Bond, Newsletter of the Guardians of the West Fork

David Beard, writing for the Dominion Post, the Morgantown newspaper, tells us Delegate Larry Williams and others are looking to encourage farming in West Virginia. This seems like a good idea to prepare for a world with 9 billion people in 30 years, an increase of 22% from today’s 7 billion.

Where will so much more food come from? Three-fourths of the earth’s surface is ocean, one-fourth is dry land. Half of that is polar, desert, mountains, swamp or otherwise unsuitable for cultivation, leaving one-eighth. Three-fourths of that is too poor, or covered by “development” so that it can not be used for crops, leaving one- thirty second of the earths surface to grow food. And in the United States alone, one million acres of that is disappearing under development each year.

Land degradation is most severe in South America and Africa, but it is a problem, too. At present, the average item on one’s plate travels something like 1600 miles between the point where it is produced and the point where it is consumed. U.S. wheat for human consumption is mostly grown in the Upper Midwest, rice in the humid South, fine crops in California and Mexico in the winter, bananas in Central America, seafood all over the world, and so on. I’ve heard it said we need a second green revolution like the one attributed to Norman Borlaug, which occurred in the 40′s to 60′s involving plant breeding and new mechanical technologies.

Many people are unaware that several crops are in a race with plant diseases. Wheat varieties are constantly being changed to keep ahead of wheat rust, a fungus which evolves rapidly. Bananas, although not a temperate zone crop, are susceptible to a fungus and must be changed to new varieties on a twenty year time scale.

We have mostly grazing farms in West Virginia, due to problems using mechanical methods to grow crops on hill sides, but our soil is adequate, the climate is O.K. and there is good rainfall – 44 inches a year in the West Fork Valley.

The technology for growing vegetables is mostly forgotten, since few families even keep a garden now, in contrast to the practice fifty years ago. Doubtless they have changed a lot, too. It’s a great idea, if people can get enough for the produce to justify the labor. It reduces transportation, improves the trust and understanding between farmer and consumer and increases the food base. Clubs which contract to deliver vegetables to the consumer weakly in season are springing up all over the U. S.

But, there is another problem which will be a bigger problem years down the road if the other economic project of the legislature works out as it’s proponents wish. That’s shale drilling.

Are people going to want to buy fruit and veggies, and beef or lamb, when they know it is coming from an area where there is water pollution or air pollution, and where mini-brownfields are every mile or so? From land that is subsoil, depleted in organic carbon and nitrogen and so full of rock that heavy trucks can drive on it in all weather? There are many stories about dead and infertile cattle and horses where fracking takes place, along with aborted calves and lambs. These come from veterinarians, too, experienced professional people.

The shale drilling project will be exhausted in a few decades, about the time the world population reaches nine billion, if not before.

How will the population be fed then? And the demand for food? Will the area lost to Shale contamination be needed? Will it still be a good idea to move food around so much?

It appears growing food – or timber or fiber for human use, will be inhibited by the land degradation of fracking. Is Del. Larry Williams’ good idea a practical one? What do you think?

Tagged as: drilling, fracking, marcellus shale