Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons

The Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons is a collaboration between a regional land trust, an urban community farm, a university sustainability center and teaching farm, and Agrarian Trust to support small-scale food production and habitat diversity and counter high rates of prime farmland loss.

Growing Partnerships

The Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons is collaborating with local farms and the New River Land Trust to create a local Agrarian Commons in Southwest Virginia, which will be the first in the state. The Agrarian Trust team is also working to develop partnerships with other organizations in the region. Garden Variety Harvests is a founding farm, and Virginia Tech’s Catawba Sustainability Center is an educational partner.

The New River Land Trust works to conserve farmland, forests, open spaces, and historic places in the New River region. They work with partners, including local governments, on larger land policy and conservation issues. They also educate landowners on conserving their land and assist landowners in donating conservation easements to protect their property from development. Since 2002, they have helped protect over 55,000 acres of land in the region and over 26 miles of New River frontage.

The Catawba Sustainability Center will provide educational support and training for the Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons. The Center is a 377-acre farm in the Catawba Valley of southwest Virginia, created and operated through a partnership between Roanoke County and Virginia Tech to provide resources and training for beginning farmers. The center’s small-farm incubator program supports eight beginning farmers.

Founded by farmer Cameron D. Terry in 2017, the Garden Variety Harvests microfarm network currently spans close to one-third of an acre, with about 8,000 square feet of gardened bed space. The farm produces a (garden) variety of herbs, greens, and fruit to further local food sovereignty and the availability of healthy local food. Cameron also maintains Morningside Urban Farm, an educational farm partnership with a local hospital.

Countering the Impacts of Development

In the words of Kim Kirkbride of the New River Land Trust, “The greatest threat to Appalachian farmland in this area is the current real estate boom in the New River and Roanoke Valleys. Farmland is only affordable for developers anymore, and so we are losing a considerable amount of good ground to rapid housing development as Blacksburg and Roanoke gentrify. This changes the way of life here permanently. Once our agricultural soils are inverted and cast aside for residential development, we’ve lost them forever.”

The threat of development, the region’s natural beauty, the ongoing decline of coal and manufacturing jobs, and the long history of small, diverse farms combine to encourage the growth of commons-based land stewardship in the region. Southwest Virginia is the most rural region of Virginia and the most mountainous. Its mountains have contributed to keeping farms small, and perhaps more ecologically minded as well. Row crops that enable large-scale pesticide/herbicide application are more difficult to maintain and less commonly produced, given the unique topography of the region.