A lack of farmland preservation threatens a fragile local food web.
Erin Flynn and her husband, Skip Connett, are farmers, and they're being squeezed on many sides by the Central Texas boom. Their Green Gate Farms property in Northeast Austin, which they've rented for 17 years, shrunk from 10 acres to 4 – with only 1.4 acres in production – after a California developer purchased the property with plans to convert it all into housing.
"If Austin is going to feed itself, and deal with climate change and food security, then we need to decide where our food is going to come from. Local policy does not set aside enough farmland within Austin, but if you go to other cities, they plan differently and will have a green ring around where people live so that the food production is close.
Austin's ongoing boom and current rush to build more housing"has outstripped the typical things that a large municipal community would have infrastructurewise," Marty says."We've certainly outstripped the capacity for public transit, those kinds of pieces. But the often [over]looked components are food system infrastructure.
Nearly a decade ago, Elgin resident Sue Beckwith, who serves as executive director of the Texas Center for Local Food, started work to open the Elgin Local Food Center, a modest commercial kitchen to bring together growers and entrepreneurs. The 10,000-square-foot center, projected to cost $1.55 million in 2019, also would have featured two training kitchens for Elgin-area students and hosted rotating food trucks selling food made on the premises.
Beckwith's food center would have met some of the needs identified in the 2019 Feasibility Study for a Central Texas Food Hub, conducted by the Austin-based Sustainable Food Center.
To meet long-term demand for 45,000 birds per week, Molberg and his business partners will need more land. Elgin is feeling the land price pressure spilling over from Austin, so the company will have to look farther south and east, to farther-flung towns like Cameron and Dime Box – 50 or so miles from Austin – to be able to afford its next expansion.
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