Pendleton County, West Virginia, is home to 540 farms. The average farm in the county has a net income of around $45,000 a year. On either coast, that's not an impressive income, but those farms are important to Pendleton County, where the median household income is $30,429.

Arlington County, Virginia, just blocks from the nation's capital, is one of the richest counties in the nation, with a median household income of $94,876, and a median family income just over $127,000. Two thousand, one hundred employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) call Arlington County home.

At least some of those EPA employees have been thinking about farms in Pendleton County. The county is in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and, consequently, in the crosshairs of a massive and detailed EPA blueprint to alter the waters of the bay.