by Tdarcos » Sat Apr 02, 2016 12:46 am
Here in the Washington, D.C. region you basically have very little exposure to agricultural practices unless you go "outside the Beltway" which is the Interstate 495 loop that circles DC, MD and VA. So the general idea is that "inside the beltway" is civilization and outside is everywhere else, i.e. nowhere.
While you do see some farmers markets (Mt. Rainier, MD has one every week during summer) which is about 3 blocks outside the District, there really isn't a lot of exposure to this sort of thing. Yes, USDA has its Beltsville (MD) Agricultural Research Facility here in Prince George's County where they study crops, true commercial agriculture is much farther away, typically at least Gaithersburg (Montgomery County, MD, about 30 miles from DC).
I used to live in Southern California back around 1985. I'd sometimes travel from Long Beach (where I worked) through Orange County, and you'd travel into places in OC where there was a strong urban area with skyscrapers, and across the street was a plot two blocks in each direction that was a strawberry field. California had a law to encourage farming in places where the land values were so high it might not be economic to do so, that for ten years, as long as you farmed the land you paid no property tax, but if you sold it during that time you had to pay back taxes. The 10-year tax moratorium could be renewed indefinitely, so it kept farmers from seeing their taxes go up so much in high-value areas that you couldn't afford to grow crops.
Here in the Washington, D.C. region you basically have very little exposure to agricultural practices unless you go "outside the Beltway" which is the Interstate 495 loop that circles DC, MD and VA. So the general idea is that "inside the beltway" is civilization and outside is everywhere else, i.e. nowhere.
While you do see some farmers markets (Mt. Rainier, MD has one every week during summer) which is about 3 blocks outside the District, there really isn't a lot of exposure to this sort of thing. Yes, USDA has its Beltsville (MD) Agricultural Research Facility here in Prince George's County where they study crops, true commercial agriculture is much farther away, typically at least Gaithersburg (Montgomery County, MD, about 30 miles from DC).
I used to live in Southern California back around 1985. I'd sometimes travel from Long Beach (where I worked) through Orange County, and you'd travel into places in OC where there was a strong urban area with skyscrapers, and across the street was a plot two blocks in each direction that was a strawberry field. California had a law to encourage farming in places where the land values were so high it might not be economic to do so, that for ten years, as long as you farmed the land you paid no property tax, but if you sold it during that time you had to pay back taxes. The 10-year tax moratorium could be renewed indefinitely, so it kept farmers from seeing their taxes go up so much in high-value areas that you couldn't afford to grow crops.