Development to cost Florida almost 3 million acres of rural land by 2020, UF expert warns

March 17, 2004

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Spreading suburbs could consume almost 3 million acres of Florida’s farmland by the year 2020, a University of Florida researcher predicts.

And more than one-third of those losses will occur in six of Florida’s most-populated counties, where fast-growing cities are encroaching on some of the state’s most productive agricultural areas.

“One of the curious things about Florida is that many of our biggest urban counties are also our biggest agricultural counties,” said John Reynolds, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “Counties like Hillsborough and Palm Beach are thought of as urban areas, but they’re among the most productive agricultural counties in the nation.”

Since 1985, Reynolds has conducted an annual survey of agricultural land values across the state. During that time, he said, the hottest agricultural properties have always been “transition” lands – agricultural parcels near urban areas that have caught the eye of developers seeking locations for new neighborhoods or shopping centers.

For decades, sprawling suburbs have consumed agricultural land across the country, and with its booming population, Florida has been at the forefront of the trend. From 1964 to 2002, the amount of Florida land planted in crops declined from more than 15 million acres to slightly more than 9 million acres, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The amount of land devoted to urban uses has grown from 1.1 million acres to over 5 million acres during the same period, USDA statistics show.

Using population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau and information on per-capita land consumption by Florida residents, Reynolds predicts the state’s urbanized areas will grow by another 2.8 million acres by 2020.

Not all of that growth will supplant working farms, Reynolds said. But all of it will come from the state’s stock of land available for agriculture – including working farms, commercial forests and undeveloped properties.

“The public benefits from all of this land,” Reynolds said. “Even if it isn’t planted in crops, agricultural land provides open space people need and environmental benefits as well. But the market isn’t very good at providing incentives to keep that land as it is.”

Not surprisingly, Reynolds expects populous counties to lead the state in urban-to-rural conversion in the next 17 years. Together, six of the state’s seven most populous counties – Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Orange, and Palm Beach – are projected to lose 1.16 million acres of land to urban development, or 38 percent of the total projected for the state.

That puts some of the state’s most productive agricultural land in the path of new development. While they’re home to some of the state’s biggest population centers, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough counties are also major producers of winter vegetables, sugar cane, citrus and ornamental plants.

Farmers in those areas are likely to feel growing development pressure in the next couple of decades, Reynolds said. That pressure may encourage many farmers to sell their farms and look for cheaper land in more rural inland counties.

“One problem with this is that you lose the benefits of growing on coastal land, which has traditionally been very good for agriculture because it’s less susceptible to freezes,” Reynolds said.

And some farmers who try to pull up stakes may find that there’s nowhere to go. As more farmers move inland, large parcels of quality farmland may become more scarce and more expensive in inland counties, said Julie Young, an agricultural appraiser for Armfield-Wagner, a Vero Beach appraisal firm.

“There’s bound to be a spiraling effect,” Young said. “As the coastal areas get built out, costs of land in the inland counties will go up.”

Life also could get tougher for the farmers who remain in urbanizing counties, as neighborhoods sprout around them, Young said.

“Once you’re surrounded by residential land, your agricultural use gets shut out,” Young said. “Neighbors start to complain about things like drifting dust from tractors and heavy machinery on the roads, and you begin competing with them for water and other resources.”

Farmers often rent land near their own to increase their production, but Reynolds said that option will likely be lost to farmers in urbanizing counties in the future.

In Palm Beach County, local government is trying to preserve green space by purchasing coastal agriculture land and renting it to farmers. But the rising value of transition land has posed problems for that program, said Clayton Hutcheson, director of UF’s Palm Beach County Extension Service.

“When this program started, the county was paying around $37,000 an acre,” Hutcheson said. “Now it’s more like $87,000 an acre.”

The county has managed to create a 2,400-acre agricultural preserve on the coast, and development has yet to encroach on the productive vegetable farms on the county’s west side, where muck soil makes construction a costly prospect. But Hutcheson expects every developable property on the coastal side of the county to be built out in 15 years.

The land squeeze is likely to have little effect on the prices of food at your local grocery store, Reynolds said, because only a fraction of the average grocery bill makes it into the hands of farmers. Packaging, preparation, and distribution costs, he said, make up much of the retail cost of food.

While the trend promises to permanently change the character of many rural farming communities, Reynolds said farmers by and large are not complaining.

“In agriculture, your land is often your retirement fund,” Reynolds said. “You work the land when you’re young, and when you’re ready to retire, you sell. So you’re going to welcome anything that raises your property value.”