The Buncombe County Farmland Protection Plan reflects a vision of interdependent urban and rural landscapes, which both enjoy and profit from the natural beauty and fertility of the land itself. The plan looks to sustaining an increasingly diverse, educated, and cosmopolitan community though a dynamic mix of enterprises of which a major proportion will be, directly or indirectly, land-based. These include not only agriculture in the narrow sense of producing crops, livestock, and timber, but also all enterprises that benefit from clean air and water and appealing rural scenery. 

Any farmland protection plan must reinforce two links simultaneously – land preservation to defend the very possibility of keeping an agricultural landscape, and farm profitability to keep the present generation on the land and draw in new blood to secure the future. The Buncombe County Agricultural Development and Farmland Protection Plan treats both of these paths of action while honoring the format prescribed in the North Carolina Farmland Preservation Enabling Act of 1986, as amended.