10/21/02

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

 

The Loss of Agricultural Land to Residential Development in the West

 

            For those of us living in the rapidly growing areas of the West, the ongoing sprawl of our cities, suburbs, and exurban settlements within commuting distance of our cities seems to be rapidly gobbling up farms, ranches, river banks and lake shores. With that residential and commercial sprawl often goes the loss of wildlife habitat and migration corridors as well as open space and scenic beauty.

            This is clearly a serious problem near our urban centers.  Some commentators, however, have argued that this type of voracious residential sprawl is consuming the entire Western landscape, threatening the viability of farming and ranching.  That characterization of the problem then quickly leads to the assertion that farm and ranch operations have to be exempt from environmental criticism and regulation. Thus we are told that efforts to reduce over-grazing or the dewatering of streams and wetlands or controls on the use of toxic chemicals or genetically modified plants will actually be environmentally counterproductive because such environmental regulation will simply lead to the abandonment of more agricultural land and its conversion to residential subdivisions. This version of the residential sprawl problem may be an exaggeration designed for political purposes rather than an accurate reflection of what is actually happening out on the land.

Some of the basic data is certainly distressing. Between 1970 and 1997 almost two million acres of agricultural land in the Western states was taken out of production. That represented a 15 percent decline; about one in seven acres in agricultural production in 1970 was no longer in production in 1997.[1]

            The data on land development is also distressing. Each year between 1982 and 1997 two to three hundred thousand acres of land were developed in the West.  Over that 15-year period, the amount of developed land increased by a third, growing at about 4.5 percent per year.[2]

            These disturbing facts, however, are more than a little misleading.  Consider the shift of land out of agriculture.  Land that is no longer used for agricultural production is not necessarily developed.  For instance, between 1982 and 1997 the amount of cropland lost in the West was almost exactly equal to the amount of land put into conservation and wetland reserves.

Poor agricultural land that cannot compete with more productive lands has been being abandoned across the United States for over a century and a half. Most of the land east of the Mississippi was originally cleared of forests to raise crops or livestock in the 18^th and 19^th centuries but was then abandoned as a result of competition from newly developed agricultural lands further west. Forests reclaimed most of that land, later laying the basis for the eastern National Forests.  The eastern United States was reforested, but agricultural production across the nation increased. Marginal agricultural land in the South and the West continues to be reclaimed by forests. It is doubtful that the abandonment of marginal agricultural lands is bad for either agriculture or the environment.

            But the type of agricultural abandonment that people are most concerned about is the land lost to residential and commercial development. However, despite appearances to the contrary around our urban centers, this has been an exceedingly slow process in the West.  Between 1982 and 1997, the percentage of the total Western landmass that is developed grew from 1.6 to 2.2 percent.  Each year about a third of an acre out of every one thousand acres was developed. At that rate, over a century, less that 4 percent of the undeveloped land would be developed and it would take 500 years for a fifth of the land to be developed. The most developed Western states, California and Washington, have about one in twenty of their acres developed. California is not, as many believe, a continuous string of sprawling metropolitan areas with their suburbs and shopping malls smothering almost all of the land.  Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah have about one in every hundred of their acres developed.[3]

            This should not be entirely surprising. Almost half of the West is in federal ownership and that half is unlikely to ever face significant development. Much of that land is now committed to agricultural production in the form of public land grazing, but if that marginal agricultural use were abandoned, the land would not be developed. Nighttime satellite pictures reveal just how concentrated development is around the West’s few urban areas and just how empty of people the rest of the West is.

            Again, this is not to say that suburban and ex-urban sprawl is not a serious social and environmental issue.  What this tells us is that it is a concentrated, localized issue.  And we have the tools to control it if we have the political will to use them: Smart growth policies, zoning, purchase of open space, conservation easements, and the purchase of development rights give us quite a suite of tools to deploy. To use them effectively, however, we have to avoid hyperbole and realistically assess where the most serious problems are and focus our attention there. At the same time, we cannot afford to be uncritical of the negative impacts that agricultural operations can sometimes have on the land.  Those negative impacts can and should be corrected, and that can be done while maintaining most of the West’s private lands in productive agricultural uses.

            The truth is that we face a much broader range of creative public policy choices in protecting our landscapes than is usually suggested by the hysterical and self-serving exaggerations that are often offered up to us as facts.