The James River Soil and Water (JRSWCD) drafted a new proposal to reduce the barriers that surround Virginia’s agricultural cost-share funding program (VACS) by recommending lowering the acreage requirements.  As of now, the acreage requirement is still 5 acres or more, our hope is that Virginia will remove this requirement.  The VACS program provides funding for the implementation of agricultural and conservation practices, such as fencing livestock out of streams, planting forested buffers along stream corridors to trap pollution, rotational grazing livestock on grass pastures, using cover crops to prevent soil erosion, and developing plans to manage fertilizers and manure. Currently, in order to qualify for VACS funding, you have to maintain five continuous acres of commercial farmland – however, this excludes numerous farmers from receiving funding. As such, the JRSWCD proposed that we reduce the acreage requirement to 0 to qualify for VACS funding.

We believe that reducing the acreage requirement will help more farmers create sustainable businesses while also diversifying the agriculture industry. In Virginia, only 36% of primary farm operators are female. This equates to around 23,575 farms within Virginia, and roughly 13 of those farms are classified as less than 9 acres. The average size of a female-owned Virginia farm is a mere 10-49 acres when compared with the overall state average farm size of 181 acres. In terms of ethnicity, roughly 3% of Virginia’s farmers are people of color, and a majority of farms owned by people of color are small farms. Moreover, the diversity of Virginia agriculture holds even higher importance when considering that agriculture is Virginia’s largest private industry. In fact, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Human Services states that Virginia agriculture “has an economic impact of $70 billion annually and provides more than 334,000 jobs in the Commonwealth.” At the JRSWCD, we firmly believe in supporting small farms, and minority and female-owned farms, and that’s why we proposed removing acreage requirements.