MASSEY — MASSEY -- Sean Jones surveys the lush green expanse of ripening winter wheat that his dairy herd will be munching all year. Fourteen hundred acres - looking in any direction, it's pretty much all you can see.
This uninterrupted vista is what convinced the Jones clan (including Sean's parents, two brothers and their families) to pull up stakes in 1995, swapping their farm near Mount Holly, N.J., to come here to Kent County, one of the remaining spots on the East Coast where farming endures as the cornerstone of a rural way of life.
In New Jersey, "we were just locked in by development," says Jones, 42. "Fortunately, we know farming in Kent County isn't going to change like that. It's our future - and our kids' future, if they want."
At a time when farmland across the Eastern Shore seems to be sprouting as many houses as crops, Kent County prides itself on being the exception. Almost 85 percent of the county's land is zoned for agriculture - and a quarter of those acres are under preservation easements that essentially ban development.
This determination to preserve Kent's rural character has given the county an image of being rather unfriendly to business. And the census needle has barely budged in a century. But Kent's bucolic landscape caught the attention of The Progressive Farmer magazine, which recently put the county at the top of its annual list of the Best Places to Live in Rural America.
Jamie Cole, managing editor of the Alabama-based journal with a circulation of 675,000, says he was impressed by the county's ability to maintain its traditional character in the shadow of urban behemoths.
"What really set it apart is the residents themselves," Cole says. "There's a dedication to the agricultural lifestyle, to a rural sensibility."
And that's the way the residents like it.
"Without a shadow of a doubt, people here want the place to stay the same," says County Councilman Ronnie Fithian, 57, who has lived in the county all his life.
Kent is perhaps a two-hour drive from Baltimore or Washington - you go over the Bay Bridge and head north. Unlike its cousins to the south, Queen Anne's, Talbot and Dorchester counties, Kent was never forced to deal with hordes of summer tourists driving to and from ocean beaches, though weekend boaters do head to the marinas of Rock Hall.
