Diane Kearns used to manage roughly three thousand acres of orchard in Frederick County. Today her company, DST LLC, works something closer to five hundred fifty or six hundred. That’s not a slow season or a bad year showing up in the numbers. It’s the shape of an entire industry contracting around her, one parcel at a time, and she’s watched it happen firsthand over roughly a decade.
An Industry Older Than the State’s Roads
Virginia’s colonial General Assembly required landholders who obtained patents for at least a hundred acres to establish a garden and an orchard as early as 1639, and by the 1650s, orchards holding hundreds or even thousands of trees were being planted specifically for cider production, since drinking water of the period often wasn’t safe on its own.
The industry’s center of gravity shifted westward as railroads reached into the interior in the late nineteenth century. Research from Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources documents that as coastal orchards declined, new orchards planted in the western mountains increased sharply, and by 1890 the state had attracted what one historian called a genuine delirium of apple planting. The Shenandoah Valley, and Frederick County around Winchester in particular, became and remains Virginia’s apple epicenter. More than a hundred commercial orchards covering upward of sixteen thousand acres still operate across the state today, producing several million bushels a year, and the Valley accounts for the largest share of that total.
The Math of a Fifty-Percent Decline
The scale of the industry’s contraction has been documented in academic detail.
A 2012 doctoral dissertation examining what researchers call the Shenandoah-Cumberland Valley Fruit District, the connected apple-growing region spanning parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, found that apple acreage across the district declined by nearly 50 percent between 1982 and roughly 2007, a twenty-five-year span. The decline hadn’t been uniform. Some parts of the district held on better than others, shaped by local land prices, proximity to expanding towns, and how individual growers chose to adapt.
Frederick County sits close to the sharp end of that trend, precisely because it sits close to Winchester, a city that has grown steadily and pushed development pressure outward into what used to be exclusively orchard land. Mark Sutphin, an agriculture and natural resources extension agent with Virginia Cooperative Extension’s Frederick County office, has pointed to that dynamic directly, telling the Winchester Star that the county is experiencing continued urbanization and pressure to develop, on top of an industry that already runs on thin profit margins.
Showing the Data
Kearns’s experience lines up with statewide numbers that have alarmed farm advocates in recent years. According to the 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture, Virginia lost more farmland between 2017 and 2022 than it had lost across the entire previous fifteen years combined, more than 488,000 acres converted to other uses, alongside roughly ten percent of all Virginia farms ceasing operation entirely during that same five-year window. Rockingham County specifically, in the heart of the Valley, lost around 304 farms over that period, one of the sharper county-level declines statewide.
Wayne Pryor, president of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, described nearly 500,000 acres lost in five years as land that people should stop and reckon with. Much of that conversion, according to research from the American Farmland Trust, comes from the same steady pressure Sutphin described locally: suburban and exurban development creeping into agricultural land, along with a newer competitor for acreage in utility-scale solar development.
The Growers Choosing to Stay In
Not every orchard story in the Valley is one of retreat. Shenandoah Valley Orchards, headquartered on more than fifteen hundred acres near Timberville, has expanded and modernized under general manager Jamie Williams, who has run the operation since 1998. Williams has spoken about staying in orchard production as a deliberate choice against the pressure to sell, telling one interviewer that he takes real satisfaction in riding across the property and knowing he’s keeping it as farmland rather than watching it become something else. He’s also been candid that the balancing act isn’t simple, that growth and sustainability compete with residential development pressing in from the edges of the property, the same dynamic Sutphin and Kearns describe roughly sixty miles north in Frederick County.
Some growers are scaling back. Others are doubling down. The land hasn’t disappeared, but the acreage under cultivation keeps shrinking around whoever chooses to keep farming it, which is a contraction that shows up first in county-level data and eventually in how many roadside stands are still selling Virginia apples come October.
Data on Virginia farmland trends is drawn from the U.S. Census of Agriculture and reporting by the Winchester Star and Virginia Mercury. Historical detail on Virginia’s apple industry is sourced from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.