David Ferrell, 20, says he sees a good future in farming, even for tobacco, a crop that has sustained his family’s farm in Charlotte County for several generations.

You couldn’t see water from Robbie Newcomb’s cornfield in Caroline County, just lots of corn and Robbie’s 14-year-old son, J.R., harvesting it behind the wheel of a red combine. But what happens on farms like Newcomb’s and thousands of others in the Chesapeake Bay watershed will play a huge role in determining the bay’s fate. A lot of farm activities are not regulated. For example, there is no requirement to keep cattle out of streams, where they erode banks and drop pollution pies. In many areas, farmers aren’t required to leave grassy strips along streams to catch polluted runoff.

Don’t think that farming isn’t a high-tech business. The Virginia Agriculture Expo in Hanover County yesterday had some of the latest trends and research on display, including a highly engineered wetlands-restoration project, new methods for reducing pollutant runoff, and equipment with GPS devices that help farmers squeeze ever more efficiency into their operations.

Inside a former milking parlor surrounded by grain silos in Hanover County, Kevin Engel sits at an oak desk in front of his laptop computer and checks soybean prices on his cell phone. He’s the face of modern farming. Engel, 48, founded Engel Family Farms in 1991. He’s now based out of Cabin Hill Farm, just down the road from where he grew up working on his father’s farm in King William County.

At just less than 3 acres, Patricia Stansbury’s tiny farm is hidden just over the Richmond city line near Bon Air. With row crops and egg-laying hens, Epic Gardens has been Stansbury’s livelihood for the past 10 years. “It is basically my only income,“ she said. Stansbury spent a large portion of her previous career life in natural foods, managing food stores and co-ops, before deciding to trade her “big house and little yard” in Westover Hills “for a little house and big yard.“

Doug Riley’s pastures and fields have been tended and tilled here in the Shenandoah Valley by four generations of his family. His father died at the farmhouse on the homeplace. His grandfather died while in the dairy barn, and his great-grandfather died while feeding the pigs. But Riley is probably the last of his clan who will work the rolling farmland framed by the Alleghenies near Swoope, in Augusta County just west of Staunton.