When I finally caught up with the new chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in the General Assembly, he said he’d been out milking cows.
That was a joke.
Sen. David Marsden represents a district that once was an agricultural heartland — about a century ago, when Fairfax County was one of the state’s biggest producers of wheat and had about more milk cows than Franklin County. Today? Fairfax County is a global capital for technology that measures its economic output in terabytes, not bushels of wheat or gallons of milk.
And yet one of the county’s state senators is now chair of Senate Ag.
Over in the House of Delegates, the new chair of that chamber’s agriculture committee is Del. Alfonso Lopez, who represents a locality that a century ago had 124 farms but today doesn’t even show up in the nation’s agricultural census — Arlington County.
This isn’t the first time that both ag committees in the General Assembly will be chaired by legislators from decidedly non-agricultural Northern Virginia. The last time Democrats controlled both chambers — 2020-2021 — the chairs were Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, and Del. Ken Plum, D-Fairfax County. Both are now gone from the legislature and after a brief Republican interregnum in the House, Democrats are back in charge of the General Assembly, and two different Northern Virginia legislators wield the gavel over ag matters.
This is a reflection of the state’s political dynamics. While Virginia may be narrowly split between the two parties, it’s sharply split geographically, with Republicans holding sway in rural areas and some suburbs, with Democrats exclusively coming from urban and suburban areas. There are few Democrats outside the urban crescent, and those are from metro centers such as Charlottesville-Albemarle County and Roanoke. There are no more rural Democrats in the legislature and only a few whose districts include any rural areas at all. Those geographical disparities show up most visibly on election maps — and in the chairmanship of the two committees most associated with rural Virginia.
“It’s crazy with Democrats,” Marsden said. “It’s hard to find someone with some ag background.”
In recent interviews, both Lopez and Marsden sought to reassure the state’s ag community.
“It’s our biggest industry, I take it seriously,” Marsden said.
Lopez says the same: “I’m very aware of the fact that ag and forestry is a major part of Virginia’s economy,” he said. “My job, I believe, is to ensure that we have a growing and vibrant ag and forestry industry and we need to make it easier for farmers to stay farming. … I think people will be surprised by how much they’ll find me a strong advocate for the ag industry in the commonwealth.” For instance, he said he’s been working with the Farm Bureau on legislation to study the need for more large-animal veterinarians in Virginia.
Now, I’m paid to be a skeptic and, of course, that’s exactly what you’d expect these legislators to say since nobody’s going to literally bite the hand that feeds them, so let’s forge on. My inquiries to Virginia’s ag industry leaders went unanswered; I suspect they were reluctant to say anything. “Everybody is very, very nice — they grit their teeth and smile,” Marsden said of ag lobbyists. “I think I’ve gotten better on ag issues — I had a good conversation with the Farm Bureau. I teased one of their people that I should be winning the award this year for ‘most improved.’ We’ll see if we can create that award.”
Del. Danny Marshall, R-Danville and formerly vice chair of House Agriculture when Republicans held the majority, ventured the skepticism I’ve heard from other Republicans: “They don’t grow a lot of tobacco in NOVA,” he said by text. “The #1 industry in Pittsylvania, Halifax and Virginia is ag. We have our work cut out for us to help them know the importance of ag for jobs and a way of life.”
All that’s pretty standard politics. Here’s what isn’t so standard: That delegate from densely populated Arlington has more agriculture connections in his background than many people even in rural areas. “My family background on both sides is farming,” Lopez said. His mother’s side of the family is from a farm in central Pennsylvania, near Altoona. “The family farmhouse built in the 1850s still stands,” he said. His father came from a long line of farmers, too — in Venezuela. “They were farmers in the Andes Mountains, 5 kilometers from the Colombia border,” he said. “My father was one of 22 brothers and sisters. My grandmother had her first child at 14, her last at 44. My grandfather ran a farm” — raising cattle and growing vegetables and yuca, a root vegetable that’s a staple in many parts of Latin America (and not to be confused with yucca, the ornamental shrub). “It was pretty hardscrabble,” Lopez said of his family’s farming in Venezuela.
That may be a different ag experience than most of us in Virginia who have had some exposure to agriculture beyond eating, but it’s Lopez’s experience — and one that means a lot to him.
Both Lopez and Marsden express great admiration for Matt Lohr, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s secretary of agriculture and forestry, even though they come from different parties. “Ag should not be a partisan issue,” Lopez said. “I think we can find a lot of common ground.”
Sometimes, though, agriculture can find itself in contentious debates. I’ve referred to both of the legislature’s ag committees as House Agriculture and Senate Agriculture, because that’s the shorthand by which they’re known. Both, though, have longer titles that give a better sense of what they handle: the House Agriculture, Chesapeake and Natural Resources Committee, and the Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee. An early look at the dockets finds bills pertaining to the State Air Pollution Control Board, the Virginia Brownfield and Coal Mine Renewable Energy Grant Fund, and motor sports racetracks pending before Senate Ag. Point being: These committees handle a lot more than just bills dealing with crops. In particular, a lot of environmental legislation moves through these committees, and that’s where there’s sometimes conflict with agricultural interests.
I grew up on a farm in Rockingham County, and every farmer I knew let their cows go down to the creek — to drink, to cool themselves, or sometimes, umm, to do their business. We gave no particular thought to what that did to the water, or how that water wound up in the Chesapeake Bay and what effect that might have on fisheries there. Now all that is regulated; farmers are supposed to fence off their creeks and let me tell you, many of them aren’t happy about that. Fencing is expensive and the regulations turn what used to be an asset — a creek — into a liability. On the other hand, those who depend on menhaden and oysters for their livelihood probably didn’t appreciate the bay becoming a lagoon for bovine sewage.
Marsden spoke of the conflict between farmers and environmentalists on that issue. “We have to deal with the environmentalists who got on us when we have to do extensions,” he said. On the other hand, “we have an 18-month backlog on fencing contractors to do stream exclusion. And when we have a drought” — such as the one that hit the Shenandoah Valley last year — “you can’t do fencing until you get a well drilled to provide water. Otherwise, you have to let them [the cows] go down to the creek.”
That’s a good example of how agricultural interests come into conflict with other interests in the state. “The environmental pressure puts a lot of heat on our ag interests,” Marsden said. As a Democrat, he’s probably a lot more in tune with some of those environmental groups than Republicans are, but he said he tries to stay sensitive to ag interests. “I even voted for [Republican] Barry Knight’s bill that you can only call liquid from a cow milk — not soy. I get it. We’re losing dairy farms like crazy.” (That bill passed the Senate 24-16 and the House 66-32 in 2020, but then-Gov. Ralph Northam vetoed it on the grounds that it might hurt other types of businesses — and was probably an unconstitutional restriction of free speech.)
Marsden says he’s working on organizing an environmental conference later this year aimed at how to make the Clean Economy Act (this is the bill that mandates a carbon-free electric grid) work better — and part of that will be trying to make it work better for rural areas. He acknowledged that some rural counties have been reluctant to authorize solar projects because they don’t want to see farmland turned into what they see as industrial use. “We’ve also got a lot of rural jurisdictions that are reluctant to do solar projects because if they get wealthier, it affects their LCI score, so maybe we need to exempt clean energy from LCI,” he said. LCI stands for Local Composite Index, the formula that helps determine how much state money goes to school systems.
Marsden is right — some rural counties are wary that if they allow too much solar development, the value of those projects will skew the funding formulas to make them look richer than they really are. Affluent localities in Northern Virginia don’t have to worry about such things because most of their school funding is local; in rural Virginia, most school funding comes from the state and nobody wants to do anything to endanger that. What may look to some as localities holding up the transition to clean energy may really be a case of localities concerned about farmland and school funding. Democrats, though, are a lot more interested in clean energy than their Republican counterparts, and this gets into some touchy issues. “Should the state take an interest in the zoning of these things and override local decisions?” Marsden asked. “Should we spread it out so everybody takes their share? What about Northern Virginia with schools and shopping areas?” — i.e., should their rooftops be used for solar? “This administration is no more interested in this than the man in the moon, so the legislature has to take a larger role in governing,” he said. (I suspect the administration won’t like that — just a hunch.)
Lopez says he wants to find ways to make it easier for Virginia farmers to sell their commodities. “What we need to be doing is helping farmers navigate the business of farming more, really helping nurture this diamond that we have in Virginia.” He cites the AFID program as a success story he’d like to see expand — that’s the Governor’s Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development Fund, which was started under Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell to provide incentives to grow ag-related production in the state. (Cardinal’s Megan Schnabel wrote about that program in 2022.) Lopez also talks up the growth of some agricultural niches — the wine industry, for instance, and indoor farming. He’s also keen on calling attention to farms that are making use of the latest management practices. “I want to make sure the committee is doing more visits to innovative farms in different parts of the state,” he said, and that “the committee is being educated as much as we can by experts at VDACS [the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services] and Virginia Tech.”
Lopez went on at some length to cite a longer list of farm statistics than I could type, but this one stuck with me: “We’re losing two dairy farms a week,” he said. “We need to ensure that dairy farmers have an easier time of it.”
That’s something I’d expect to hear a legislator from Rockingham County say, not necessarily Arlington County. On the other hand, these two legislators might have a more relevant perspective on this than some skeptics might think. The nation’s 1930 agricultural census reported that farmers in Arlington produced 184,152 gallons of milk and that farmers in Fairfax produced 4,254,739 gallons — the latter rivaling Augusta County and topped only by Rockingham County and Loudoun County, then the state’s biggest dairy county. Now, the latest ag census shows that Arlington produces no milk and Fairfax County not enough to count, while Loudon is better known for its data centers than its dairies.
But we all still like to eat.