ABSTRACT
The portion of Washington State to the west of the Cascade Mountains represents less than one-third of the state's total land area. Western Washington residents have supported some form of local farmland protection legislation since the early 1970s, evidence of their belief that the land market is not adequately protecting farmland. The authors used county-level data from the Washington State Office of Financial Management, the US Census of Agriculture, and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis to describe trends in population and agriculture in 14 of the 19 counties in western Washington between 1974 and 1992. They chose these 14 counties because they are the most populous or the fastest-growing as defined in the Growth Management Act (GMA) and, therefore, most likely to contain farmland under development pressure. A survey of western Washington planning departments provides insight into local concerns and issues surrounding farmland resources and an assessment of the effectiveness of farmland protection strategies since 1985.
