Features: Virginia's Small Farmers Weather Unpredictability

A typical day on Oak Level Farm in Yale, Va., varies by season, but one thing remains constant: long hours. Jared Webb works 60 hours or more every week to manage and maintain the small farm that his grandfather inherited in the 1960s. "I got to spend a lot of time riding around with my granddad on tractors. Farming here was always something that I wanted to do," says Webb, who began to operate the farm in the early 2000s after his grandfather passed away and not long after he graduated from Virginia Tech's Agricultural Technology program. Today, Webb oversees cattle, cotton, peanuts, and other crops on the 1,700-acre farm. Oak Level is one of nearly 40,000 small farms in Virginia that together account for 83 percent of all farms in the commonwealth. Most of Virginia's small farms grow diverse specialty crops of fruits and vegetables. They contribute to the state's largest private industry, agriculture, which has an annual economic impact of more than $82 billion and creates over 380,000 jobs, based on a report from the University of Virginia. Despite this, the number of small farms is falling. According to the Census of Agriculture, which is administered every five years by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Virginia lost over 480,000 acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022, more than it lost during the 15-year period between 2001 and 2016. Virginia became an agrarian colony toward the beginning of the 17th century, with tobacco as its primary crop. Since then, the agriculture industry in Virginia has become more geographically and agriculturally diverse. But the economics have long been challenging for small farmers, who now face additional headwinds from tariffs and federal funding cuts.