31 Jul Protecting Austin’s local agricultural sector

A discussion of employing community gardens to develop Austin’s urban farming policies, creating incentives for developers, and the need to bring in expertise from real estate and land planning groups: these were just some of the highlights from the last Farmland Access Subcommittee meeting. This subcommittee will develop recommendations that will be used by City Council to carry out legislation to protect Austin’s agricultural sector.

As the second meeting of the group began, a map from the Imagine Austin document about Austin’s combined future land use was passed around the room.  It was clear to everyone that, although there was a category for agricultural land use, its presence on the map could not be distinguished.  Because of this lack of representation of agriculture on the map, the group began to discuss ways to bring agriculture into the land planning scene, whether it was through the work of Watershed Planning, Real Estate Services, or the Planning and Development Review Office. 

As Real Estate Services has recently made recommendations about parcels of land for use as community gardens, it would be a short step to add urban farms to the list of possible recommendations.  One point brought up was that community gardens could also be a hop-off point when making recommendations to the city, rebranding Urban farms as “Community farms”.  This would give the city more precedent to enact policies for urban farms.

The meeting also discussed other ways that urban farms could be integrated into policy.  Similar to how developers utilize affordable housing programs or follow Transit Oriented Development (TOD) requirements, “Affordable Agriculture” or “Agriculturally Oriented Development” policies could help provide increased food availability to residents and help support local agriculture.

Future considerations for the Subcommittee will include ways to revise urban zoning  to better include agriculture, questions of how to best integrate for-profit farms into future policies, and ways to increase farmland access through the leasing of both public and private land.