Agricultural Distribution in Wake

Wake County, North Carolina is often thought of to be a mostly metropolitan area. Having a population of 1.175 Million people as of 2022 makes it the most populous county in North Carolina.

Additionally, Wake County does have a healthy agricultural presence. But due to the prevalent image of Raleigh being a common association with Wake County, the county's agricultural presence can easily be overlooked.

Wake County consists of 12 major municipalities: Apex, Cary, Fuquay-Varina, Garner, Holly Springs, Knightdale, Morrisville, Raleigh, Rolesville, Wake Forest, Wendell and Zebulon.

Shown in the Corporate Municipal limitations in the map above, most of Wake County's city jurisdiction areas exist towards the central and western portions of the county.

As of 2020, most of the County is considered to be in a predominantly Urban area. The areas which stand out to be predominantly rural mostly exist on the Northern edge of the county, with some exceptions.

With this in mind, where are farms in Wake County? As a part of my internship with Dr. Thomas Ray and NC State Cooperative Extensions, I was tasked with locating where some of these farms are. Thankfully, Mr. Jonathan Smith, NC State Agricultural Extension Agent in Field Crops and Livestock, was able to give me a list of Farmers in Wake County.

Using this list, I was able to create 22 maps displaying where these farmers are located within the county.

Please note that Mr. Smith's list is from 2023 and consists of mostly larger-scale farmers. Thus his data does not represent all of the farmers in Wake County now or during the time the list was made.

Note that not many farmers listed in the data were shown to live in the western regions of Wake County. It is currently inconclusive as to where this is the fault of the data, so a complete, adequate analysis of the geographic dispersion of these farms cannot be made at this time.

Please also note that for the safety of the farmers' privacy, pop-ups have been disabled for the following maps.

Most farmers listed in the data live in the southeastern and northeastern parts of Wake County. Clustering of farmers around specific areas in those regions is evident. Many of the farmers also live in the regions which are considered to be predominantly rural.

When I began analyzing the data, five particular crops stood out to be most prevalently grown within the farmers listed in the data: Hay, Corn, Soybeans, Tobacco, & Wheat.

From there, I decided to filter out which of these farmers grew these crops. Additionally, I was able to filter out parcels from Wake County Open Data's Parcels dataset which belonged to these farmers. As such, the following maps look at where the farmers from the data are that grow these types of crops, overlaid with Wake County Municipalities and the 2020 Census Population Characteristics:

The presence of Hay farms exists strongly in southern Wake County with some along the northern regions. These farms are also generally spread out on a county-wide scale. We can also see a wide range of parcel sizes, from very small to very large. The majority of these Hay Farms exist in predominantly urban regions and are closer to larger municipal regions.

By contrast, the Corn farms listed have a stronger presence in eastern Wake County. These farms have fewer, smaller parcel sizes and for the most part tend to be located closer towards central Wake County. They are located for the most part in predominantly urban regions, but are generally slightly farther from larger municipal regions than the listed Hay Farms.

Soybeans were the most listed type of grown crop in the dataset. These farms exist along the eastern regions of Wake County, very similar in presence to the listed Corn Farms. Higher amounts of clustering with this crop exists in both farm locations and parcel locations. These farms have a mixture of being located in predominantly urban and rural regions. Some are closer than others to municipal regions.

In addition to being the second least grown of the crops grown by farmers listed in the data, Tobacco is also is the most geographically skewed out of the five most listed crops. Only one farm location exists outside the northeast portion of Wake County. In the northeast, farms of this crop generally have medium spacing between them from a county-wide scale. Parcels of this crop are more medium-sized, similar to Soybean parcels. These farms are mostly aggregated in or around predominantly rural regions and are generally farther from municipal regions.

Similar to listed Soybeans and Corn farms, Wheat is geographically present along the eastern edge of Wake County. It also has generally larger parcel sizes with some farms being located in predominantly urban areas, and some being located in and around predominantly rural areas. Many of these farms are also located near municipal regions.

Additionally, I thought it might be interesting to analyze which farmers listed in the data also had livestock:

In addition to a wider range of parcel sizes, there is a large geographic dispersion. Clustering does exist for these farms, but in varying degrees throughout the county. The majority of these farms are located in predominantly urban regions and/or surrounding predominantly rural regions.

Now that we've looked at the individual crops, we can see how they relate to each other by cross-analyzing. There is a large amount of data here, so feel free to scroll through.

Looking through these analyses made with the existing data, we can see that some farm types have higher levels of geographic distancing than others. Ironically, many of the listed farms are located in predominantly urban areas. However, most of Wake County is considered predominantly urban. Many of these farms are also located near municipal areas, though many are not actually in them.

Regardless, there are still a large amount of farms in Wake County as seen by the data. There are also regions where farmers listed in the data seem to be aggregated around. Some of these regions are in or near predominantly rural areas. Even without a complete analysis, it is clear that Wake County has a prevalent agricultural presence.