Hot News

3.20.2007

(Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted with permission from the Winter 2007 issue of the Northern Neck Land Conservancy newsletter, http://www.nnconserve.org)

Fourth-generation Northumberland County, Va., farmer Luther Welch has this vision.
The interesting thing about it is that he can look back seven decades and see it.
Or look forward seven decades — and more — and see it still. Largely unchanged. And that’s just the way he likes it.
Working with the Northern Neck Land Conservancy and the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, Welch this past December completed his donation of a conservation easement totaling 71 acres of his farmland surrounding what one day will be the Northern Neck Farm Museum and the Luther Welch Agriculture Center on Route 360, between Burgess and Horsehead.
“It is our desire to preserve the rural nature of this land for future generations,” said Welch and his wife of nearly 56 years, Margaret, of their efforts to secure conservation easements.
All around him, Welch sees farmers selling their agricultural land for development and heading off to presumably greener fields, “buying big cars and flat-screened TVs.”
“Then they come back home and they have nothing: No land and no way to provide for their families. No way to grow their food or food for others. That is not the way we want to do things,” he said, in his typical no-nonsense, pull-no-punches way of putting things.
Sitting in a blue jump suit off the kitchen of Margaret’s childhood home on Balls Neck on a recent Saturday, Welch chuckles as he recalls his earliest days as a four- and five- year old on his family farm in Avalon, about five miles from Heathsville.
“If you put your hand in there and you feel something cold, pull your hand back real quick,” he said of the earliest lessons he learned on tending the hen house. “Or if you see something black wrapped around a pole in the hen house, it’s also a black snake, trying to crush the eggs.”
A veritable pack rat when it comes to keeping personal files on his family’s decades of Northumberland farming, Welch, still actively farming himself, takes pride in pointing out that son Alan and his wife, now fifth-generation farmers, are continuing the family’s family traditions.
From one of many three-ring binders, he pulls yellowed clips and fading copies of aging newspaper articles telling of his farming adventures; of a “Why I Love Farming” newspaper article he himself had written about five years ago (one observation: “I love the smell of fresh dirt.”).
Amidst a farm equipment collection of scores of pieces that the Smithsonian Institution doubtless would covet, Welch can be philosophical in speaking about his legacy of open agricultural fields and historical farming artifacts.
“I own nothing,” he insists, emphasizing his conviction that we are all just passing visitors on this Earth. “I tell people, don’t worry about tomorrow. What’s the reason? They’re stressing themselves to death. They’re not going to carry it on with them.
“I really don’t consider that I own the land. I don’t own the land, I’m just paying taxes on it, and I’m going to leave it some day,” he says in characterizing himself as “old school.”
And that bit about the Smithsonian’s likely coveting his historic farm equipment collection? No matter, Welch replies without hesitation. Can’t have it. “I want it to be in the Northern Neck, that’s why,” he said.
Welch, who has been conducting no-till farming for more than 20 years (including on back-acreage fields that no one could see), says that for farmers, “no-till is one of the best things that’s ever happened.” He jokes that his no-till farming was widely seen as a local curiosity when he first started it, but his subsequent yields — and savings in money, fuel, and time in a tractor cab — have more than proven their worth. He envisions a time when farmers will apply only nitrogen and lime on their fields.
“My family would never do anything to harm the watermen,” The Rappahannock Record quoted him as saying in reporting on his being honored by the Northumberland Association for Progressive Stewardship. “No-tilling protects them and it protects us.”
Step into his back yard, and one finds a 100-by-60-foot barn housing his collection of thousands of pieces of farm equipment ranging from self-propelled gleaners and historical tractors to single-row pre-World War II corn pickers, a 1915 and a 1934 McCormick Deering F 12 tractor, and nearly 100 antique blocks and pulls.
He and Margaret and the Farm Museum Board are working now to raise the funds to support construction of the farm museum.
Asked when he expects that museum to open, Welch replies wryly, “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, it ends up, can’t come soon enough for Luther and Margaret Welch to see that museum dream become reality. He’s hoping in fact, it can open no later than next year. Those who know him best aren’t inclined to bet against his accomplishing his lofty goals.
For more information on the proposed Northern Neck Farm Museum, on 10 acres donated by Welch for its construction, call 804-462-7510. Tax-deductible donations can be made payable to “Northern Neck Farm Museum” and mailed to Northern Neck Farm Museum, P.O. Box 365, Heathsville, VA 22473.