The goal is to give state or local agricultural agents a method of prioritizing areas that need focused help and assisting farmers in making informed decisions about what to do with their land, he said.
Unsurprisingly, data from the past decade or so shows agricultural land around major metro areas such as Greenville, Columbia, Charleston and Myrtle Beach is most threatened by gentrification, meaning land values are outpacing income levels.
A new mapping tool from Furman University’s Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities shows gentrification pressures threaten farms around major areas like Charleston, Greenville, Columbia and Myrtle Beach. The team wants to share this tool with agriculture extensions and farmers.
There are also spots like Longtown, an unincorporated community in Fairfield County, and Campobello in Spartanburg County where there is a divergence of housing prices and income of greater than 30 percent.
The research underscores a troubling national trend showing farmland continues to decline across the country. In the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture survey, there were 1.88 million U.S. farms in 2024, down 8 percent from the 2.04 million in the 2017 Census of Agriculture.
There’s no question that losing that land is bad for food supply. But with gentrification comes opportunity. As farming becomes increasingly more consolidated and corporate farming takes over a larger market share, the prospect of selling land to a housing subdivision developer “may be terrifying, or it may be gratifying,” Kolb said.
“You know, maybe you’re looking for an opportunity to cash out, or maybe you’re really upset because you’re losing a familiar space. It can depend,” he said.
South Carolina legislators are trying to address the state’s land loss problem by offering incentives to farmers to adopt conservation easements — a legal agreement that permanently limits how land can be used to protect its agricultural value, no matter who owns it.
In Congress, lawmakers have also introduced bills to restrict how much American farmland foreign adversaries can own or buy because of concerns about hostile attempts to take over the U.S. food chain. China holds only about 1 percent of all foreign-owned land in the United States, while Canada owns nearly one-third, according to USDA.
