One of the largest examples of "farmshoring" to date is getting under way in rural southwestern Virginia. But that being coal country, maybe this is actually a case of "mineshoring."

Farmshoring, the practice of sending software-related jobs to rural areas of the U.S., has been heralded as an antidote to offshoring, in which those same jobs are sent to far-away, low-wage places like India and China. Workers in Wichita make more than those in Bangalore, but there are fewer hurdles to overcome in the way of culture, language and time zones.

According to a story by Ellen McCarthy in The Washington Post early last month, the reasons for sending coding work to rural Virginia are many. Chief among them may be the fact that government contractors are often constrained from giving jobs to overseas workers. But a couple of those contractors, CGI-AMS Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corp., complain that the job market in northern Virginia is just too tight. So both companies in the next few months will begin building multimillion-dollar technology centers in Lebanon, Va., and will recruit hundreds of software engineers at salaries well above the region's average, according to the Post's story.

Why Lebanon? McCarthy explains: "Local officials drafted a study to show that 4,566 computer science degrees were awarded in the past five years by colleges within 100 miles of Lebanon, including Virginia Tech, Radford University and James Madison University. Area community colleges promised to tailor their courses to fit CGI-AMS's needs, and the county said it would build a new $5 million, 53,000-square-foot facility where the company could do relatively basic software development and troubleshooting."

-- 65 percent: Percentage of U.S.-based IT workers who say they usually first hear about important business matters through rumor.