ELLISTON — Dave Long can remember when Montgomery County had more than a dozen dairy farms and supported four family-owned feed and flour mills.
Today he can count the number of local dairies on one white powdered hand, and Big Spring Mill, owned and operated by his family since 1935, is the only mill left standing.
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The packing and washing house at Five Penny Farm in Floyd this week became the scene of the annual local foods “Meet-and-Eat,” a networking day for local growers, grocers and chefs.
As a farmers market groupie and known food lover, I was lucky enough to be invited for the second time. Sponsored by the Blue Ridge [...]

All that’s left to do now is the tucking in, my farmer friends told me today by e-mail. They have called it a year, and most of my intership in organic farming is over. What the starving deer didn’t eat of the fall greens will go to the local natural foods stores, or to friends [...]

When Tom Klatka looks across Buchannan’s bottom at Virginia Tech’s Kentland plantation, he sees more than an orderly agricultural testing center. He sees the beginnings of North American agriculture.
In his mind, Klatka conjures the dozens of known and unknown Native American villages hugging Montgomery County’s Fertile Crescent, the floodplain of a horseshoe bend in the New River, [...]

This just in from Virginia Tech’s public information department:
“Virginia Tech’s funding for research and development in the agricultural sciences jumped nearly $8.8 million in 2006, according to the most recent figures from the National Science Foundation. This raises Virginia Tech from the No. 11 to the No. 10 ranking for agricultural research expenditures in the [...]