Of Pigs & Cows
We think of Alleghany County as being rural and sparsely populated. And, with an average of nearly 2 cows per person and only 45 people per square mile (psm), it is. By contrast, Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) has less than 1 cow for ever 1000 persons and 1,321 persons psm.
(Pegging the meter is New York County (Manhattan), NY. Origionally farmed by the same Lenape Indians who gave us the name Alleghany and later by Dutch settlers who build the famous wall on Wall Street to keep then out, the county has not a single cow these days but does have 66,940 persons psm!)
According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service (I'll bet you didn't know you were paying for that one with your tax dollars) there were 544 farms in Alleghany county in 2002 with half of them being larger than 73 acres. Surprisingly -- to me at least -- only 48 of them were dairy farms. And, while sheep were found on 20 farms, only a single one could be found with a pig on it!
With just one pig farm in the whole county, it's no wonder that the barbecue of the Blue Ridge Mountains plays second fiddle to the barbecue from the Piedmont and Coast Plains of North Carolina.
Moo.
(Pegging the meter is New York County (Manhattan), NY. Origionally farmed by the same Lenape Indians who gave us the name Alleghany and later by Dutch settlers who build the famous wall on Wall Street to keep then out, the county has not a single cow these days but does have 66,940 persons psm!)
According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service (I'll bet you didn't know you were paying for that one with your tax dollars) there were 544 farms in Alleghany county in 2002 with half of them being larger than 73 acres. Surprisingly -- to me at least -- only 48 of them were dairy farms. And, while sheep were found on 20 farms, only a single one could be found with a pig on it!
With just one pig farm in the whole county, it's no wonder that the barbecue of the Blue Ridge Mountains plays second fiddle to the barbecue from the Piedmont and Coast Plains of North Carolina.
Moo.
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