The same land that is desirable for crops is desirable for shopping centers and other urban uses. Forest land acreage should remain stable or even grow since forestry products seem to have a bright future. The amount of forest land in NC was about 18.7 million acres in the 1930's and it is still about that amount now. North Carolina agriculture was once predominantly a subsistence agriculture with little extra produced for trade or sell, but today it is overwhelmingly a cash crop agriculture competing on a world market. An hour of farm labor produces nearly eight times as much today as it did only 40 years ago.
Most people have a sentimental and false notion of what rural life was like in the past.
But the truth is, it was a brutal life where people worked long and hard and typically died young. The environment also suffered. We cannot turn the clock back to this lifestyle for a variety of economic and sociological reasons. Lifestyles and expectations have changed, as they should have. Farmers today, just as most other people, generate income to purchase the necessities and comforts of life.