Help Create Austin’s First Food Plan
By Skip Connett and Erin Flynn, Co-founders, Green Gate Farms and Friends of the Land
Farmers are notorious for their optimistic and determined ways. They are last to complain and first to help each other when the going gets tough. These hardy traits, combined with working on the frontlines of a burgeoning food and climate crisis, is why their calls for help demand more attention.
A year ago this month, a candid assessment from one of the toughest, most successful farming couples in Central Texas underscored the extreme pressures farms are facing — from weather disasters to staffing shortages to development pressures. “We’ve been doing this more than 30 years and this is by far the hardest one,” Pamela Arnosky wrote in her farm’s monthly July 2022 newsletter, as that month broke its all-time average high temperature.
Only five months earlier, another head-spinning record had been broken when temperatures plunged 55 degrees in 24 hours. Like us, plant and animals are highly adaptive within limits, but these are being tested at every turn lately. Amid the panic of empty food shelves during the pandemic and Winter Storm Uri, Texas Ag Commissioner Sid Miller admitted our food system is broken and needs to adapt to these new realities.
That acknowledgement comes as no surprise to organic vegetable growers at Steelbow Farm in East Austin, a rising star in the local food community. The recent social media post from its co-owner, Finnegan Ferreboeuf, underscores the difficulties facing her farm and others:
“We are really having to consider if summer growing is/will be tenable in the near future,” she wrote. “With no top down guidance or planning, it sure feels like it falls to us overworked, under-resourced, tired small business owners to navigate this.”
As elders in the sustainable farming community, we are invested in ensuring the success of the next generation of growers. And this can’t be accomplished without greater involvement from the business community.
The total annual economic impact of food in Austin is $4.1 billion. That’s one of the reasons why the City of Austin is putting together its first ever 5-year Food Plan. A game plan is needed to ensure Austin’s food security and equity as we become a city with more than one million residents. What steps should be taken now so that weather or disease does not empty our shelves again? What must be done to make sure that farmers stay and thrive in Central Texas? If you eat, consider this your personal invitation to get involved in finding solutions.
From New York City to Lawrence, KS, municipalities are revolutionizing local food policies. In step with Austin’s Office of Sustainability, Bastrop County’s Texas Center for Local Food is also bringing new faces and ideas to the table. Innovative partnerships, systemic solutions, and bold leadership are needed to guarantee that Central Texas has an equitable, resilient food system — one that you, your family, your employees, your farmers, and your neighbors can count on when the going gets tough.
Recently, executive directors in the non-profit food sector met at our farm to discuss how Austin can boost its local food economy. Everyone agreed it can’t be done without industry, academia, and health care taking a more dynamic role. If ever there was a time to dream big and make bold changes, now is it. What if:
Austin had a mandate for increasing local sustainable food production similar to its pledge for renewable energy?
Counties surrounding large metro areas create agricultural zones where our best soils and most reliable water are protected so farmers can afford land and thrive without the constant disruption caused by rezoning, suburban sprawl, mining, and spiraling property taxes?
Public health and academia set goals like Emory University? (75% of the food purchased by Emory University and 25% of food purchased by its Healthcare system are to to be locally or sustainably grown by 2025.)
Austin’s food-conscious shoppers have not just one or two but 30 food co-ops like Minnesota’s Twin Cities to choose from?
Austin-based businesses mentored beginning farmers graduating from our local sustainable ag programs and followed the lead of Tito’s Vodka where employee perks include fresh vegetables grown on its campus?
We know firsthand that innovation requires collaboration. Eight years ago, when development came to the farm we lease in east Austin, we were told it was time to move on. Instead, we led the effort to create Austin’s first agrihood. Together with the developer, our neighbors, businesses, and the city, this historic farm site, built by the Bergstrom family in 1902, is now the country’s first tiny home community with a certified organic farm at its center. Village Farm is proof that combining more affordable housing with urban farming is a viable model for more sustainable growth.
That’s why we are fighting so hard to protect the farm we own in Bastrop’s Wilbarger Bend. Like iconic Boggy Creek Farm, our urban bounty is supplemented by larger-scale production outside the city. Our plan has been to create a thriving food hub with farmer training and subsided housing, agro-tourism, and farm-based education with nearby schools. Instead, the food businesses and four farms already established on Wilbarger Bend are now threatened by aggregate mines, industrial manufacturing, unsafe roads, and poorly planned subdivisions.
Even land-rich Texas must come to terms with the limits of the resources that are rarely found together: the Bend’s prime farmland and state’s highest-rated water (the very attributes driving ecotourism dollars to neighboring McKinney Roughs and the Hyatt Lost Pines.)
After several decades of feeding and flowering our neighbors, we know that the only way to assure the health and preservation of our fertile river bends and watersheds is to establish agricultural zones where land restoration is incorporated with low-impact farming practices. Other states have been doing this for years. It’s time for Texas to catch up.
