Most of John Smiley’s major milestones have been celebrated on his farm in Adams County. It’s where he was born, where he learned to park a tractor, where he’s raised his children and the cattle he makes his living off of.
On a cold winter day, he drives around the hilly terrain in his utility vehicle, stopping frequently to point out parts of the farm’s history: the woods where his father tapped maple, the site of an old sawmill, the former horse stable that he now uses for storage.
He’s the seventh Smiley generation to farm this land over the last 250 years.
“As a little boy, that's the only thing I've ever wanted to do,” Smiley said. “I really feel blessed that I've been able to do what I've really wanted to do.”
From 2017 to 2022, Ohio lost around 300,000 acres of farmland. Still, many family farms, like Smiley’s, are holding on and preserving their agricultural legacy through the Ohio’s Historic Family Farms Program.
Ohio’s oldest family farm
The Smiley family has farmed around 500 acres since 1772 – before Ohio was a state, and before the United States was even a country.
Native American tribes cultivated land in Ohio for several centuries before European settlement, but most surviving documentation started in the post-colonial era. Smiley’s family has a particular claim to longevity fame: it’s the oldest continually operating farm registered with the Ohio Historic Family Farms Program.
“They tell me that it's the only farm still in existence that the ground was acquired from King George III of England,” Smiley said.
More than 2,000 Ohio farms are registered in the program. Every county in Ohio has a so-called “Century Farm”, land that’s been used to make food for more than a hundred years.
“It really brings that focus back to the history of agriculture,” said Brian Baldridge, director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, who can trace his own agricultural ancestry back to the 19th century. “What does [it] mean for our state? What does [it] mean for our local families or communities?”
Challenges to preservation
Today, these long-farmed lands stand out more and more as it’s become harder for small farms to survive, Baldridge said.
“Ohio farming has gotten larger and there's been mergers. Farmers are farming more ground, they're raising more livestock,” he said.
While agriculture remains one of the state’s largest industries, it’s facing competition. With businesses like Intel expanding into central Ohio, corn, soybean and wheat farmer Geoff Mavis said there’s increased pressure to sell off productive farmland.
“I've always thought that we needed to look after our farmland and not let it get too developed,” Mavis said. “Housing starts, you hear all that [in] terms of progress. I think farmland is kind of ignored.”
Continuing Ohio’s agricultural legacy
Mavis farms more than 900 acres in Fayette County, 40 miles southwest of Columbus. His ancestor James Madison Willis, the son of a Boston Tea Party Revolutionary, started the farm in 1840.
Mavis is proud to be part of this long tradition of farming, but he isn’t afraid to deviate from the path of his forebears. He’s the first of his family to introduce conservation practices like no till farming and cover cropping. It’s an effort to think not just about the past, but about the future.
“I think it's worth saving,” he said. “There's just a really nice ecosystem here that we can help make even better.”
Mavis has a son and grandson that seem interested in taking up the family business. But he isn’t leaving the farm’s fate up to chance: he put his land in an agricultural easement so it legally has to remain farmland, no matter who owns it.
That easement means the land will persist here for centuries more, providing food for generations. Farmers like him and Smiley know the land will outlast them; they just want to see its value recognized while they’re here.
“We're grateful,” Mavis said. “We've been given a gift from God to keep it, to try to be good stewards.”
