There’s nothing like savoring delicious strawberries, tomatoes, and green peppers in wintertime. But in the United States, much of these winter crops are grown in Florida, and farmland there is rapidly disappearing.
A new report by the University of Florida reveals the extent of the threat. More than two hundred thousand acres—roughly the size of New York City—that are currently devoted to fruit and vegetable production are at risk of conversion to other uses by 2070.
This includes 20 percent of the acres used for citrus fruits, half of the land for other fruit crops, 43 percent of potato acres, and 33 percent for fresh-market vegetables. Much of that land is threatened by residential and commercial development.
Due to its warm climate, rich soil, and sufficient sun and rainfall, Florida currently provides more than a third of the nation’s oranges and grapefruits, half its fresh market tomatoes, and a significant portion of bell peppers, watermelon, strawberries, sweet corn, and other produce.
“In the United States, it’s one of the only places producing fresh fruits and vegetables in wintertime to supply the whole nation,” says Zhengfei Guan, an agricultural economist at the University of Florida who was not involved with the report but has studied the state’s agricultural industry.
The loss of so much farmland, projected to occur in numerous counties throughout the state, has implications for the widespread availability and safety of winter produce, along with the ability of the U.S. to ensure a stable food supply.
Agriculture is often treated similarly to other products when it comes to trade policy, but it shouldn’t be, Guan says.
“We can survive without an iPhone, but not without food. Food security is of paramount importance for a sovereign nation,” he says.
Cattle grazing and tree farm lands are at risk, too
Roughly a third of the state’s land is currently devoted to agriculture, including the fruit and vegetable farms as well as millions of acres devoted to nurseries and tree farms, cattle grazing pastures, and other uses.
Some 20 percent of this land, or two million acres, could be lost to development by 2070, according to the report, called Agriculture 2040/2070 and coauthored with the nonprofit 1000 Friends of Florida. An additional 41,000 acres will also disappear under sea level rise.
Losing swaths of agricultural land will bring additional problems. These lands filter drinking water, provide for flood control, harbor wildlife, and sequester carbon in a way that helps mitigate the impacts of climate change, experts say.
The U.S government believes protecting farmland from conversions to nonagricultural uses is so important that decades ago it passed a law ensuring that federal policies didn’t inadvertently cause this to happen. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture closely monitored the country’s food supply chain to watch for critical shortages and in 2022 announced a desire to better protect our access to food, in part through more local production.
Nonetheless, there are few laws keeping Florida’s farmlands from disappearing.
Under pressure for decades
Many Florida produce farms have faced financial pressures for three decades, since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. This pact eliminated most trade restrictions between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
More than other farming states, Florida’s fruit and vegetable growers were particularly hard hit, suddenly finding themselves competing with Mexico since the two locations produce similar crops in winter. Agricultural imports from Mexico ballooned from less than $3 billion dollars in 1990 to $33 billion in 2020, Guan’s research shows.
Part of this can be traced to labor costs, since picking fruits and vegetables is labor intensive and workers in Mexico are paid much less than those in the U.S.
But an additional reason is that for years, Mexican farmers received extensive financial support from their government, even though this assistance was prohibited under NAFTA, another of Guan’s studies found. Especially problematic were subsidies for building greenhouses, an indoor growing technique that increases yield and has enabled Mexico to surpass Florida in producing fresh tomatoes.
After NAFTA was renegotiated in 2020 (it’s now called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) Mexico no longer underwrites this practice. “But the damage has been done,” Guan says.
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When farming is less profitable, farmers are more easily enticed to sell their land to housing developers, says Michael O’Brien, a scientist at the University of Florida Center for Landscape Conservation Planning who worked on the report.
Such demand for land is already intense, with several hundred thousand new residents flocking to the state each year. By 2070, the state’s population, currently 22 million residents, is expected to increase by 12 million people.
There is no silver bullet solution for housing all the newcomers, says Ernie Shea, president of the farmer-based nonprofit Solutions from the Land in Lutherville, Maryland, which worked with UF on the report.
“There will be tradeoffs. We want to make sure the farming community has a seat at the table and is heard,” Shea says.
Everyone has a stake in protecting the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Produce is so abundant in dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant phytochemicals and other anti-inflammatory agents that its consumption has been linked to the prevention of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, osteoporosis, mental illnesses, and more.
“People should fill half their plate with fruits and vegetables, but most people don’t do that,” says Andres Ardisson Korat, a scientist at Tuft University’s Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging.
In fact, only 12 percent of Americans currently meet the government-recommended daily fruit and vegetable goals of one-and-a-half to two cup-equivalents of fruits and two to three cup-equivalents of vegetables.
Depending on how it is stored and transported, imported produce generally has the same nutritional value as that grown in the U.S. But some crops are more likely to contain higher levels of pesticides.
A report released in April by Consumer Reports found unhealthy pesticide residue in 20 percent of the produce it sampled, with some imports from Mexico at riskier levels. (Several domestic crops, especially non-organic blueberries and bell peppers, also contained dangerous quantities of these chemicals.)
Saving farmland is a choice
Whether the UF’s worse-case scenario comes to pass depends on choices made by governments at the federal, state, and local levels, Shea says.
Some 16 percent of Florida’s agricultural land is currently legally protected, but much more could be. The report states that farming could become more profitable if landowners were compensated for other benefits provided by their land, like water storage that helps with flood control or wildlife habitation protecting birds and other species.
(The quest to protect the Florida wildlife corridor gains ground.)
When farmland needs to be developed, it must be done in a way that protects farms nearby.
“Fragmentation of farmland is a huge problem, since there has to be a certain critical mass in an area for infrastructure, such as processing facilities, to be located nearby. If a county loses that critical mass, agriculture becomes unviable,” O’Brien says.
Preventing fragmentation is the reason communities in Florida have traditionally separated agricultural areas from housing, such as in Palm Beach County’s designated agricultural reserve and Miami-Dade County’s urban development boundary. In recent years these areas, like many around the state, have faced incursion pressure from developers.
Communities also can be developed in a way that increases density, such as by clustering multifamily homes instead of building single-family homes on large lots. This approach would save numerous acres, the report states.
Whatever solutions are ultimately agreed upon, steps to protect agriculture must not be delayed, Guan says.
“Once farmland is converted to a neighborhood, it can’t reverse back,” he says. “If you lose farmland, it is gone.”
