Sprawl

I read in TC Palm that a report from The American Farmland Trust stated that Martin County will lose more farmland unless better land-management practices are enacted.

The study was written in 2022, so it is almost 4 years old. They found that about 2.2% of the then existing farmland will be gone by 2040. There were 588 farms on 179,342 agricultural acres in the county. Yet I have more hope than what the study suggests. I think the acreage lost will be reduced significantly.

Martin County passed a ½ cent sales tax, and it is projected to bring in about $20 million over its ten-year span to buy environmentally sensitive land outright or if possible, have agricultural and conservation easements. It is not only sales tax money but also it can be used to leverage grants with the state and even private organizations to stretch the dollars further.

Last year, Bull Hammock Ranch sold the development rights of 588 acres to the State of Florida to preserve the land in perpetuity in ranching and agriculture. I toured the ranch earlier this year with the owner, Wes Carlton. It was only there that I began to see what preservation is all about and how the government is far behind private property owners like Carlton in that regard.

Along with other governmental entities, I believe that Martin County can help preserve the land. But placing land in trust or buying for the public purpose of keeping it as natural as possible is only half the answer. The other half lies in not wasting land.

Sprawl is the other contributor to taking land out of agricultural production. Much of our developed land is not used as productively as it should be. Our environmental footprint overuses much of our resources by not clustering as much development as possible in cities and towns. When we encourage single-family development with large yards, we encourage the destruction of farmland to meet demand.

Newfield in Palm City is an example of clustering single-family homes, duplexes and multi-family homes together leaving vast swaths of open space. Every duplex that is built instead of building a single-family home preserves farmland because that is not needed to house a family. Why is that so hard for people to grasp?

If local municipal and county government can’t write ordinances encouraging more density, then the state governments will do so. This fight is happening all over the country in Blue and Red States. We will end up losing more and more farmland and open land if we don’t see the problem is us and our outdated land development and zoning codes.

Photo by Aiden Frazier on Unsplash