SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

18 January 2002
Austin History Center
Austin, Texas

During lunch, two speakers presented. Carol Ann Sayle, an Austin-area, small-scale organic farmer at Boggy Creek Farm, spoke first. She explained that she and her husband had first bought their land in 1982, developed it as an organic farm in 1992, and opened a farm stand in 1994. They now employ 5 to 7 full-time people, and farm 5 acres in Travis and 40 acres in Milam counties in what she called a hand-crafted approach, relying more on labor than machinery and chemical inputs. As an indication, a study comparing their organic farm to a conventional operation found that they used only 2% of the off-site inputs required on an average farm, making their business more ecologically sustainable and less debt-ridden.

Their approach focuses on diversity, both to protect the soil and to attract customers: each season, they grow 15 to 25 crops, or 60 to 70 in the course of a year. They also sell various value-added items, such as cookbooks, jams and other condiments, as well as items from other growers, including organic meat and goat cheese. They had originally sold wholesale through established groceries, such as Fresh Plus and Whole Foods, but found that they had better financial results by selling direct to the public.

They do not generally participate in community gardens, although they do support the Green Corn Project for indigent urban gardeners, and some of their laborers have gone on to have their own private gardens. They also do not participate in the Travis County Farmers’ Market, finding that they were often trying to compete with non-farmer peddlers selling conventional produce at poor quality and lower prices. Unfortunately, there is a chicken-and-egg problem with Texas farmers’ markets - there are not enough local small-scale growers to support a farmers’ market, because they do not see a supportive market, which in turn probably doesn’t exist because there isn’t enough local produce, etc. For example, the largest Austin farmers’ market attracts only 30 growers, while the market in Santa Fe, a much smaller town, brings in 130 vendors.

Ms. Sayle sees two obstacles beyond the issues of growing and selling: finding adequate water and purchasing adequate land. They have been fortunate to have had a shallow 28-foot well that draws on perched Colorado River water, but saw it go dry in recent years. Also, land is very expensive near potential markets, and increasingly fragmented. This is no abstract issue for them: they saw an acre tract that they had long coveted recently subdivided into 4 $10,000 lots and sold for home sites.

Our second speaker, Ellen Humphries, the development and outreach coordinator for the Texas office of the American Farmland Trust, picked up on this theme of agricultural land loss. She showed a map that indicated that the 4th most threatened prime US agricultural area was along the IH-35 corridor, stretching from Dallas to San Antonio, and that the 8th most threatened primte American agricultural area was also located in Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Both of these areas are threatened by rapid residential development. To give a sense of the pace, 1400 square miles of agricultural land were converted in Texas during the 1992-97 period, the equivalent of the loss of 150% of Travis County’s area in just five years.

Ms. Humphries explained that rural landowners often contacted the American Farmland Trust, worried over the loss of their estate, land, and lifestyle, but often simultaneously tempted by developers’ offers of $10,000 to $15,000 per acre, and the promised escape from the grind and high risk of the agricultural economy.

Recent results from a Texas A&M rural lands inventory support this impression. The inventory showed rapid subdivision among the "bread-and-butter", family-farm scale of Texas farm and ranch lands, those in the size range of 500 to 1000 acres. The fragmentation appears to be due to advancing age among landowners (the average age of the South Texas Farm and Ranch Club is 72), a lack of willing heirs, and the potential income from subdivision. On the other hand, the inventory indicated consolidation among commercial-scale ranches over 2000 acres, and proliferation in smaller, recreational tracts.

Ms. Humphries sees some exciting tools, however, which could help stem the loss of agricultural lands and heritage. These tools focus on use of conservation easements, the voluntary restriction of land uses. These easements can be either given or sold at a bargain price to a land trust in exchange for gift or estate tax deductions. Or they can be bought by the government or private sector in order to retire those same development rights: this "PDR", or purchase of development rights option, got a good deal of attention from Bush’s Conservation Task Force, and recently was adopted by the Legislature as the focus of a study initiated in November 2001.

Beyond these tools for landowners, Ms. Humphries believes that a broad public educational effort is needed. For instance, she thinks that Texans need to better understand the habitat and watershed values of agricultural land which benefit wildlife, recreation, and drinking water needs of the state. As an example, she feels that the public needs to learn about the risk that Hays County faces from dewatering of their aquifer due to the proliferation of 5-acre tracts dependent on groundwater.

Also, she thinks that rural county and local governments need to understand the financial downside of subdivision and development of large tracts. As an example, she offered the results of AFT’s Cost of Community Services studies, one of which was recently finished for Hays County, another of which is underway for Bandera County, and 70 of which have been conducted across the U.S. Consistently, these studies have found that residential developments do not pay their way: in Hays county, for instance, agricultural and commercial lands required 33 cents in services for each $1 in taxes paid, while residential lands required $1.26 in services for every $1 in taxes rendered.

Ms. Humphries fielded questions next.

Questions and Answers

Q: How might purchases of development rights be funded? Ms. Humphries said that San Antonio offered one option: there the citizens had passed a 1/8 cent sales tax to support land conservation, including PDR use. Other states had seen land conservation taxes applied to cell phone use or cigarette purchases.

Q: Could there be a possible coalition between the agricultural and environmental communities over the loss of farm and ranch lands? Ms. Humphries said that there was a good prospect, but trust needed to be built, and respect for private property rights.

Q: Is there a cost estimate for meaningful, wide-scale PDR use? Mr. Bristol said that it was difficult to make an estimate, but hoped that a pilot project could be passed. Even a pilot might be hard to pass though, given the tight budget and broad redistricting effects in the Legislature.