Texas is home to over 142 million acres of private farms, ranches and forest lands, thus leading the nation in land area devoted to privately-owned working lands. Accounting for 84 percent of the state, these rural lands provide economic, environmental, and recreational benefits, including a $73 billion agriculture industry, the second largest in the country.

“Agricultural lands provide significant public benefits, such as clean, abundant water, carbon sequestration and clean air,” said Blair Fitzsimons, Texas advisor to AFT. “This study is a wake-up call that those public benefits are disappearing.”

The 2009 Texas Land Trends study updates and expands a 2003 Texas A&M study commissioned by AFT. “The loss of agricultural, range and forestry lands was significantly higher in the 2009 study than in the 2003 study,” said IRNR’s Dr. Neal Wilkins, who authored both studies. One important difference between the two studies is the inclusion of population data and projections in the 2009 report.

“Our analysis revealed several interesting trends. First, our work confirms the close relationship with population change, ownership change, land values, and land use that was observed in our previous work. We did find that the fragmentation of large farms and ranches follows a regional pattern that roughly corresponds to the boundaries of ecological regions. In general, the traditional ranching regions?Trans Pecos, South Texas, and Edwards Plateau—continued to lose large ownerships to fragmentation,” said Dr. Wilkins.

“In contrast, some of the regions that have a greater focus on row-crop farming—high plains, rolling plains, and blackland prairies—experienced some consolidation of small and mid-sized ownerships into larger operations. When considered along with the influence of concentrated population growth, we believe these trends point to some regional priority for lessening the effects of fragmentation and loss of rural lands through market-based incentives.”

Overall, the prospects for loss in the future appear to be even more alarming,” added Dr. Wilkins, “because over the last several decades large ownerships have been broken up into smaller ownerships, predisposing those lands for accelerated conversion.”

Highlights of the 2009 Rural Land Trends study include:

• Loss of Agricultural Lands: According to County Appraisal District data, over
  2.1 million acres of farms, ranches and forestlands were converted to other uses between 1997 and 2007. Over 40 percent of this land conversion was related to growth and development associated with population expansion in the state’s 25 highest growth counties. During this period, 861,765 acres were lost from the agricultural land base in these counties. As a function of population increase, roughly 149 acres of agricultural lands were consumed per 1,000 new residents.
• Ownership size: The 2007 USDA Census of Agriculture accounted for over
  247,000 farming and ranching operations in the state. This represents an 8 percent increase since the 1997 Census. In other words, each year, Texas gained about 1,900 new working farms and ranches. However, the land base for Texas agriculture decreased by as much as 2 percent during the same period. Average ownership size declined from 585 acres in 1997 to 527 acres in 2007.
• Land use: Native rangeland, with 92.6 million acres, is the predominant category of land use in Texas. Since 1997, native rangeland losses have exceeded 4.8 million acres, while dry (non-irrigated) cropland declined by 1.57 million acres.
  
• Land values: In 2007, the average appraised market value of farms, ranches and
  forest lands in Texas was $1,196 per acre, which is a 140 percent increase over the past ten years.

The 2009 Texas Land Trends study can be found at www.texaslandtrends.org; and visit http://www.farmland.org/resources/reports/TXLand.asp for additional AFT analysis.

The study was funded in part by The Brown Foundation, Houston Endowment, Inc., Shield-Ayers Foundation, Magnolia Charitable Trust, and The Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation and the members of American Farmland Trust.

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