A process is under way to protect farmland in Surry County using a $25,000 state grant awarded this month.

That was welcome news Wednesday for Bryan Cave, director of the Surry unit of the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service.

“Once you pave over it or put a house on it, it’s never going to be farmland again,” Cave said of the available agricultural property in the county. “People don’t tear down houses or tear up parking lots to start farming.”

Less and less land has been devoted to agriculture in recent decades, with the last federal Census of Agriculture in 2007 revealing that just less than 115,000 acres is still being farmed in Surry.

“Which is roughly a third of the county,” Cave said. The 2007 figure, the latest available, represented about a 10-percent drop in acreage from the previous agricultural census in 2002.

Surry has about 1,250 farms of varying sizes, according to Cave.

The $25,000 grant from the N.C. Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund was awarded to the Piedmont Land Conservancy (PLC), a grassroots land trust headquartered in Greensboro.

Its mission includes permanently protecting vital lands to conserve rivers, streams and natural and scenic areas in a nine-county region that includes Surry. The Piedmont Land Conservancy will use the grant to develop a farmland-protection plan for Surry County which is expected to serve as a planning tool for future generations.

“The goal of the plan is to research the county and do all our due diligence to make sure that the farmland preservation that takes place — or does not take place, for that matter — occurs in the proper areas,” explained PLC Executive Director Kevin Redding.

“What we want to end up with is a big map showing where farming is most feasible,” Redding said, which would reflect such factors as soil conditions most suitable for agriculture. At the same time, the project will “identify areas where cities and towns expect to have a lot of growth,” the PLC official added.

The goal is a “working document” that will guide future development in a way that will avoid prime farmland being lost, he said.

“We’re going to start gathering information any day now,” Redding said last week. Along with governmental officials in Surry, contacts will be made on a voluntary basis with landowners interested in preserving their land for generations to come.

The research will focus on existing agricultural activity and challenges to farming families, which Cave says have been experiencing a gradual decline.

One of the concerns of the local Cooperative Extension Service official involves the fact that the average age of farmers is rising, meaning less young people are entering agriculture.

“The farms are typically getting larger on average,” Cave added.

Having the protection plan also will allow participating farms to better qualify for the state trust fund and other financial opportunities for preservation, according to Redding. In addition to underwriting the cost of protection plans, the trust fund supplies money for buying conservation easements.

“There’s very limited funds available for farmland preservation,” the PLC official pointed out, with the plan to help ensure that the best parcels will be available for agricultural use for many years.

Cave said the declining agricultural trends in Surry have been mirrored across the state and nation as well, which collectively paint a disturbing scenario where loss of farmland is concerned.

The local extension spokesman referred to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture concerning the outlook for farming as this century progresses. By 2050, the world’s population will be 9.1 billion if present growth rates continue.

“In order for agriculture to sufficiently feed that population, it’ll take almost a 70-percent increase in production,” Cave said, citing the long-range outlook.

“That is a scary, scary thought.”

Contact Tom Joyce at tjoyce@mtairynews.com or at 719-1924.