Even as Lancaster County preserves farms, it loses other farms and farm acreage to development each year.
Everyone knows that.
Everyone except the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's 2007 Census of Agriculture, released last year, indicates that Lancaster County (and, in fact, the United States as a whole) reversed a trend and added farms.
The county lost 402 farms and 16,591 acres between 1997 and 2002, according to the census. But it regained 169 farms and 13,488 acres from 2002 to 2007.
So the county now contains 5,462 farms with 425,336 acres in agriculture, according to the USDA.
Is the Garden Spot actually expanding its agricultural acreage?
Not at all, says Matt Knepper, who directs the county's Agricultural Preserve Board.
"The American Farmland Trust says we're losing about 1,000 acres of agricultural land a year, inside and outside designated growth areas," he says. "That's the number we use."
Most of that lost acreage, Knepper notes, comes from farmers subdividing one-acre and two-acre building lots.
"Those are the drips in the bucket that add up to a thousand acres," he says.
Knepper also uses a rounded number for remaining farms: 5,000.
Karen Martynick, director of Lancaster Farmland Trust, uses the same numbers. She says any increase in farms would have to come from subdivisions of existing farms.
Lancaster County planning director James Cowhey, using county assessment land classification data, estimates that the county is losing about 1,250 acres of agricultural land a year.
This is a major reduction from an estimated 8,000 acres lost annually in the 1960s and nearly 3,000 acres in the 1980s, when the county was developing faster and agricultural zoning and preservation were not so strong, Cowhey says.
"It's difficult to calculate," Cowhey observes of the annual acreage loss, "mainly because the definition of farmland can include or exclude ag-industrial uses, such as feed lots and mills." Fallow farms and forested areas also may be included.
Tom Daniels, a former county Agricultural Preserve Board director and now a professor of planning at the University of Pennsylvania, believes it is "counterintuitive" that farms and farm acres would increase between 2002 and 2007.
Daniels says the USDA overcounts farms by including, by its own definition, "any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold or normally would have been produced or sold during the year."
This definition includes many "hobby farms," says Daniels. "They're not really contributing that much to the agricultural industry."
In addition, Daniels notes, the USDA gathers its numbers through mail surveys — an outdated sampling procedure when more precise GIS data is available.
"I think they do this just to make themselves look more important than they really are," he says. "They count about 2.2 million farms in the United States, but about half of them are hobby farms."
Deborah Bowers, editor of the Farmland Preservation Report, a leading national source of information on issues related to farmland and open space protection, agrees with Daniels.
"It's all in the method of counting," she says. "Being on the ground at the local level is quite different from looking at the ground from outer space and using averages."
Something similar to the 2002-2007 increase occurred between 1992 and 1997, when the number of farms and agricultural acreage in Lancaster County also moved upward, according to census figures.
USDA officials explained that farms increased at that time because the definition of a "farm" expanded in 1997 to include Christmas tree producers, as well as conservation and wetlands reserves.
The explanation is different for the 2002-2007 change.
"Statistics is not an exact science," says Brad Summa, a USDA statistician. "This is our best estimate. We don't have a complete list of all farm operators."
All farmers do not return census forms, he notes, but the department did make a special effort to locate small farms through agricultural organizations this time around.
In addition, Summa explains, the $1,000 production threshold hasn't changed in three decades, so inflation has added more small farm operations to census data.
"It gets really tough for us when we get into small geographic areas," Summa admits. "We feel good about national and state data, but less so about the small areas."