
You’ve no doubt heard the sad tale of Vermont and New Hampshire agriculture by now. Farming washed over our states like a tidal wave in the late eighteenth century, covering more than three quarters of the landscape. Within a few generations, however, the tide reversed. The thin, bony soils were exhausted, and the sons and daughters of the original farmers streamed west in search of real agricultural land, leaving behind thousands of miles of old stone walls running through the woods: the high-water mark of New England agriculture.
There are a million things wrong with this story. Or 1,679,891 things, to be exact.
That’s the number of acres of outstanding farmland in New Hampshire and Vermont today, according to the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), formerly known as the Soil Conservation Service. Of these acres, 561,497 are considered “prime agricultural soils” – soils so good that farmers everywhere, including those in the legendary Ohio, Mississippi, or San Joaquin valleys, would go out of their way to sink a plow into them.
The remaining million or so acres are considered soils “of statewide significance.” These may not be quite as enticing to your typical Iowa farmer, whose holdings may include loam that is hundreds of feet thick, but they are still darn good acres by almost every other measure. Soil is to farming a little bit the way snow is to cross-country skiing: having a hundred feet underfoot is all well and good, but it’s the top little bit that really matters.
A few more statistics. The 1.7 million acres of prime and statewide-significance soils add up to 15 percent of the twin states’ total acreage of 11.6 million. Twenty-one percent of Vermont is in this category, as is 8 percent of New Hampshire. Essex County in northwest Vermont has not yet been mapped by the NRCS, so the numbers may be somewhat higher.
On the other hand, 71,000 of the prime acres are only be suitable for agriculture “if drained”, meaning that these acres aren’t likely to ever be farmed.
Either way, we used to have more prime agricultural soil than we do now. Here’s the key line in the NRCS’s definition of prime farmland, taken from the 2005 National Soil Survey Handbook: “prime farmland…cannot be areas of urban or built-up land.” In other words, once it’s paved, it’s removed from the total. Seeing as most of our houses, roads, businesses, and malls have been built on the very flattest and best-drained soils in the two states, how many acres of outstanding farmland have been converted to other uses? A couple hundred thousand? Half a million?
If the soils here are so good, why does the story of “New England is bad for agriculture” persist? Two reasons. First, at the height of the agricultural boom, more than half of the land being farmed was on steep slopes and thin soils. These soils were indeed bad for agriculture, and people (in hindsight) had no business farming them. You can still find places in the woods where, two centuries later, soil has yet to return to the eroded dooryards and washed-out barnyards of those long-abandoned farmsteads. The image of the played-out hill farm is not a myth at all.
The second reason for the enduring myth is the obvious fact that most of our food these days is grown somewhere else and trucked in. But this has nothing to do with bony soil – remember the 1.7 million acres of outstanding farmland? In the world of business, economies of scale are balanced by the cost of transportation. We spend considerable sums from the public purse to make transportation relatively inexpensive, and in so doing, we (inadvertently at least) favor large farms at the expense of small ones. New England farms are always going to be small, given our tight, hilly landscape.
Back to the facts on the ground. Any guess how many acres are listed as currently being farmed in New Hampshire in Vermont, according to the 2002 U.S. Census of Agriculture? 1.7 million, which is almost exactly the same as the number of acres that the NRCS considers to be of prime or statewide significance. This is not to suggest that there is a one-to-one correlation between the two, since many farms include sub-optimal land, many prime acres aren’t currently in production, and small patches of excellent farmland aren’t tallied because they occur in areas too small to be individually noted on the maps.
But it certainly is to suggest that the idea of New England being a poor place for agriculture ought to be buried 6 feet under. Fortunately, and contrary to myth, we have plenty of good soil on hand for the job.