City seeks input on area food plan that highlights fragility for farms, restaurants

The Office of Sustainability has published the draft of its long-in-development food plan for Austin and Travis County, which seeks to balance pressures of development and land use against the need to feed a fast-growing metro area. Released last month after more than a year of community input on priorities related to food availability and equality, the draft plan is available for comment until April 19. The first online discussion on the draft plan is scheduled for Wednesday, with those talks helping to shape a final plan that’s  expected to go before City Council for approval this summer.

The draft plan is divided into nine major goals: preservation of local farmland, availability of agriculture resources to marginalized groups, improving quality of life for food and farm workers, making the local food system more resilient, improving the local food supply chain, expanding access to quality food, decreasing food waste, addressing environmental concerns related to food production and transport, and increasing awareness of the impact of the food system in local quality of life. Those nine broad goals have 74 total smaller steps the sustainability office and relevant groups have identified as key to making the larger food plan a success.

The push to create the plan came in the aftermath of the early 2021 winter storm that disrupted power and water service to major portions of the city and exposed the fragility of the local food system when thousands of residents saw their food spoil in their homes, then found store shelves empty for days when they were able to travel again.

As city staff and other community leaders began to study the realities of food availability and production in the greater five-county area, the weak spots became clear very quickly: Every day, the city loses 16.8 acres of farmland located mostly in the fertile Eastern Crescent region that has experienced heavy development pressures for at least two decades. Also only 0.06 percent of all food consumed in Travis County is locally produced, and each day 1.24 million pounds of food is wasted.

That imbalance also opens up business opportunities for those interested in solving discrete pieces of the food problem, because research shows about $2.3 billion is spent annually transporting food to the area, with that cost baked in to the final purchase price of meals prepared in homes or area restaurants. While major producers of food products such as Tyson Foods operate in the state and supply huge amounts of local meat products or produce, local mid-sized farmers and livestock producers say the area’s food infrastructure is so lacking that it’s difficult to stay in business.

At a recent meeting of the Joint Sustainability Committee that featured a presentation on the draft plan, members were supportive of the effort and expressed concern about the likelihood the city and Travis County would be able to address the many interconnected challenges related to keeping all Austinites fed. Sergio Torres-Peralta, a food and resilience coordinator in the sustainability office, said the time and effort given to the plan’s creation by community members and the many food-focused nonprofit groups in the area show there is a willingness to make the plan a priority locally.

“One of the biggest challenges is to find the right balance in between what our community members want versus what we can do and where we can actually write in the food plan,” he said. “Goal No. 1 talks about agriculture and increasing agriculture because we know that we’re losing land, agricultural land, at a staggering rate. We also know that we need to house people, so there is a challenge there. How do we make a solution that works for everybody that doesn’t create unintended consequences? We’re working very diligently to find those.”

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