Wave after wave of neighborhoods, shopping centers and office parks have taken thousands of acres of farms out of cultivation in Chesapeake in the past two decades. It’s been years since anyone bought a farm there to actually farm it.

With but a single exception, the boom has turned farmland into a seller’s market, especially for the large tracts that are cleared and free of wetlands.

It’s a seller’s market everywhere in Chesapeake — except along the Dismal Swamp Canal where the Virginia Department of Transportation is rebuilding U.S. 17. The law and the Constitution oblige VDOT to make a property owner whole when it takes his land for a highway.

But along U.S. 17, VDOT is trying to turn back the clock with a condemnation time machine that is out of touch and out of control.

Just how badly it’s working was evident last week when a jury of special commissioners ruled, after a five-day trial in one of the biggest disputes along the U.S. 17 corridor. At issue was how much VDOT owed the Cartwright family for taking 13 acres for the roadbed and for cutting off access to 391 acres on the other side of the new road.

VDOT initially said that $112,000 was fair, then made a $303,000 final offer. The jury’s $2.4 million award, eight times VDOT’s last offer, shredded any pretensions about the fairness of VDOT’s condemnation process.

To the Cartwrights, the new highway resembles a 1.5-mile Great Wall through their 1,500-acre farm. The road bed is 10 feet high and 200 feet wide.

Last week’s decision brings to $4 million the amount the Cartwrights have won by refusing to surrender. In total, the awards are almost seven times greater than what VDOT proposed as a fair price.

But $4 million isn’t the cause of celebration it appears. About half will go for lawyers and experts. Even in the face of such intransigence, the Cartwrights can’t recover any expenses, an injustice that VDOT has used to its advantage for years. Most property owners in the same predicament surrender without a fight because it is so hard and costly to beat VDOT.

A law was adopted this winter, in response to the mistreatment of the Cartwrights, allowing recovery of a fraction of legal expenses. But it will go into effect this summer, too late to help them. VDOT was the principal opponent of the reforms championed by Virginia Beach Del. Bob McDonnell.

Not only with the Cartwrights, but up and down U.S. 17, VDOT has held up property owners by holding out the fiction that farming corn, soybeans and wheat is the land’s highest and best use. Trying in vain to enforce that delusion just against the Cartwrights will end up costing taxpayers no less than $500,000 in legal bills alone. By now, you’d think VDOT would have seen the error of its ways. But in an act of institutional hubris, VDOT decided to appeal the decision.

VDOT had its day in court and lost. Now, it should leave the Cartwrights be and let them get back to farming. Instead of denying what’s apparent, VDOT would better serve the taxpayers — and its own self-interest in restoring public trust — by acknowledging that something’s badly broken and by trying to fix it.