Sprawl across the Whoopers: NY Times Looks at Bells Bend

Today's Times has a piece on rare whooping cranes in Bells Bend and the farming community's resistance to a condo-office development group led by Nashville big shot Tony Giarratana. It also has some fairly staggering statistics about Tennessee farmers:

Much of the building has come at the expense of farmland. Today, Tennessee has 84,000 farms, down from 127,000 in 1970, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. The American Farmland Trust, a group working to stop the loss of productive farmland and promote healthier farming practices, estimates that Tennessee is losing 42,000 acres of farmland each year, much of it to development. The United States Forest Service says one quarter of the state’s 14.4 million acres of forests will be gone in 30 years.

There is also a video of the cranes attached to the story.