Whiddon urged regional discussions on the issues.

“The people of South Georgia need to get together and decide what we want to be like in 20 years or 50 years,” Whiddon said. “You have to go a long way to find the quality of life we have here. I’ve been as far north as Minnesota and as far west as California. I don’t know of any other place I’d rather live. If there weren’t more positives than there are negatives in South Georgia, why is everyone moving here and trying to build it up?”

It’s the economy, too

Agriculture generates an estimated $560 million annually into the South Georgia economy, according to Southeast Agriculture Coalition Inc. Executive Director Jerome Tucker.

For every dollar a farmer spends to produce crops, three more dollars are generated in the community, Fourakers said.

“It has a tremendous impact. I don’t believe the average consumer understands the value of the agriculture infrastructure,” Fourakers said. “We are so used to going to Publix or Wal-Mart to get our stuff that we have lost the connection as to where our food comes from. The serious thing about it is, once our farmers go out of production, they won’t go back in. It’s not like manufacturing where you just sort of turn the factory back on. It takes a year or more to get back into the planting cycle, and it’s pretty expensive to do. Once it is broken, we can’t go back into it overnight. We need to protect our agriculture infrastructure.”

Fourakers said he knows many Lowndes farmers who were forced to buy land surrounding their farms to prevent developers from buying it.

Andrews noted that developers buy uplands with the best soils for growing crops. “They don’t go look for the worst land in swamps or wetlands,” he said. “They’re buying up top quality land for farming.”

Andrews also noted that county taxes in rural counties will rise with residential development because rural infrastructure is much cheaper to maintain and support.

“You’ll need paved roads and road maintenance money, police and fire protection, and other infrastructure support that is more expensive in urban areas,” he said.

Those higher taxes combined with the recent struggles of farmers hit by the Easter freeze, drought and wildfires has caused a lot of farmers to sell their land just to break even and survive, Whiddon said.

“And when they sell their farm land, they try to get the most money they can. And that means selling it to developers at top dollar,” Whiddon said.

Also, as more farms are sold off to developers, the United States has to import more food from abroad, where standards for pesticides, insecticides and other protections are much more lax than in the United States, Fourakers said. “We’re all reading about China right now,” he noted.

“We’ve all gone through the oil shortage,” he said. “You go to the grocery store with money in your pocket to buy food, but there is no food on the shelves to buy. Think about that.”