When several hundred people converged in Raleigh last month to implore state legislators to do more for farmland preservation, the largest delegation in the state came from WNC.
Farmers boarded a bus chartered by the Haywood County Farm Bureau for the lobbying effort that Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler deemed “Farmland Preservation Advocacy Day.” Their message: farmland is going under pavement way too fast and North Carolina needs more money and a long-range plan to stop the trend.
“When you put a shopping center on a field of land, it will never grow corn again,” said Martha Mills, chair of the Haywood County Farmland Preservation Board…