struction. Even though it is just in
such places that protected, scenic, connotative rural landscapes might
have the most meaning for the most people in the long run, their
preservation presents some tough questions. Patterns of growth that
would spare them could easily be worked out and would fit in well with
watershed protection and open space needs, but the economics of
compensating farm owners for the loss of the big money they might have
received for them is another thing.

In some other parts of the Basin, the implications of a modern unified
economy are a threat to traditional farms and farming methods. Labor
costs, the need for expensive machinery, superior methods of storage of
foodstuffs and easy transport over long distances have put Potomac
farmers into competition with other regions, even other countries, where
the same products they supply can be raised on an industrial scale of
investment and profit. Thus the worth of a field of tomatoes in the
Northern Neck of Virginia is affected by massive irrigated production in
the Central Valley of California, and thus a Shenandoah farmer may
barely break even or suffer a loss on a rather good crop of wheat in the
old "bread basket of the Confederacy."

Such influences, even though dulled a bit by protective State and
Federal farm programs, are putting a premium on specialization, ever
larger farms, and an "agribusiness" approach, with high capital and
operating expenses. Their effect on many family farms in the Basin's
mountain regions, places with limited acreage of marginally productive
land, is severe. These may have supported the clans that own them
reasonably well for a century or more, but they cannot compete with
Ohio. Unless their owners are willing to keep on farming while holding
down a job in town for supplementary cash, they often move away and the
places go out of cultivation. Some are consolidated into grazing or
forestry units or bigger farms, some stand abandoned, some go on the
market as vacation retreats and "hobby farms" for wide-ranging
metropolitans.

Richer regions share the troubles. In the classic valley of the
Monocacy, some of whose dairy farmers have to import feed now from the
Midwest because they cannot raise it cheaply enough themselves, the size
of the optimum farm, one that can compete effectively in today's market,
has swelled in the past few years from about 150 acres to about 600,
according to a study by the State of Maryland.