In 1979, Winfred Trice moved his family to Madison,
Ga., with
dreams of green acres and bank accounts in the black.

Today, a sign in front of Trice’s 80-acre farm advertises the
coming of a golf course community.

“The taxes are getting so high and farm prices are dropping so
low, we just can’t afford to farm anymore,” Trice said. “I will
probably get out of farming altogether. There’s just not much
future to it.”

Trice is not alone. After years in the irrigation business, he’s
seen others struggle. “Very few farmers I see are making
progress,” he said. “They’re all going backward.”

As farmland taxes skyrocket, Trice said, “about the only way a
farmer can get out of debt is to sell his farm and get out of
farming. It got me out of debt.”

In Madison, which skirts metro Atlanta, the price of land has
also gone sky-high.

“I think a lot of the people are running from Atlanta, coming out
to live in the country,” Trice said. “That has people buying
land, subdividing and making a good profit. My only regret is
that we sold a little too soon. Prices keep going up.”

Every county in Georgia has lost farmland over the past 50 years.
Some have lost as much as 90 percent of it. In 1945, Georgia was
more than 63 percent farmland. Today, 28 percent is in farms.

“Each year, 225 Georgia farmers leave the land,” said former Gov.
Zell Miller in a recent speech. “Over the past 30 years, an
average of 465 acres of Georgia farmland has been lost per
day.”

As urban Georgia overflows into rural areas, social and
environmental problems quickly arise.

“From an agricultural standpoint, the largest problem is dealing
with farm odors,” said Horace Hudson of the University of
Georgia. Hudson heads the agricultural leadership, education and
communication unit of the UGA College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences.

“People who aren’t used to it don’t like the smells of farm
operations like chicken litter or hog manure,” Hudson said.

Other issues these areas face are some types of chemical spraying
and the fear of animal waste lagoons overflowing to contaminate
water supplies. “Sometimes noise and the slowing traffic of farm
vehicles can annoy urbanites not used to it,” Hudson added.

These merging populations also face social problems.

“We’ve seen heated discussions over land use, planning and zoning
and the inadequacy of protecting either side,” Hudson said.

That has already become evident for Georgia’s poultry
industry.

“It is an issue and will become more of an issue as urban areas
expand into agricultural areas,” said Dan Cunningham, a UGA
extension poultry scientist.

“Over the past couple of years, we’ve begun working with some
counties on these zoning issues,” he said. “As the poultry
industry has expanded, some counties have decided to look at
zoning issues. Most of our counties haven’t had any real zoning
related to poultry houses.”

Zoning is good protection for poultry growers and their
neighbors. “As new people move in, it becomes more an issue,”
Cunningham said, “because people are less tolerant of those kinds
of things.”

These problems prevail where rural and urban areas are facing
off. And Hudson doesn’t see a quick answer to them.

“I think they’re going to continue,” Hudson said. “It could
eventually affect farm production overall.”

One long-term effect is a kind of Catch-22. “Many urbanites move
to the fringe of these rural areas because they want that green,
open space,” Hudson said. “And before long, it’s gone. Very
little green space is left in DeKalb County. As Gwinnett and
Cherokee become more urban, more green space is lost there,
too.”

As farms disappear one by one, Hudson sees the long-term result
as dire. “I think we will eventually cause our food production to
move outside the United States,” he said. “There are already
reports of the swine industry looking at South America.”

“We’ll still have pork,” he said. “But we can look at history
when the food supply was used as leverage over other countries.
The country that has the food has the better position.”