Menu

For city folks, a fond memory is of a leisurely Sunday drive through the country. The family piling into the car and heading out to enjoy the sights of farm animals, green fields and the peacefulness of the countryside. Farm folks too can remember when an occasional car would come down the road. Those Sunday drive-by visitors were welcome too, because they'd be gone tomorrow, back at their city jobs, back in their homes in town.

Things today have changed. Now, those people driving by the farmstead aren't just brief visitors. They're the new neighbors. They're the folks who decided to grab their piece of the American dream, and that piece just happens to be right next door to the farms of Ohio.

As the number of rural homes grows, so too does the infrastructure to support those people. More roads, more stores, more schools. Each square foot of development eats up a square foot of productive farmland.

Does this mean we should stop people from building in the country? No. Neither should we simply surrender our farm ground to housing complexes and strip malls.

Ohio's communities must decide what they want their neighborhoods, towns and surrounding countryside to look like. Farms and rural homes are not exclusive of one another. Ohio can have both vibrant communities and viable agriculture. But it won't just happen. Together, our community must figure out how. See page 8 for information on OFBF's NeighborConnections summer tour, which will address this very topic.