The Austin restaurant scene was rocked by a recent announcement that sent chefs panicking while most diners obliviously continued their meals.
The couple behind Steelbow Farms, a five-acre urban farm near Manor, announced that they would be moving to upstate New York. The organic, sustainable farm, run by Finegan Ferreboeuf and Jason Gold, was revered by chefs who created dishes around its specialty produce — like dozens of pepper varieties and bitter chicory greens.
But like many urban farmers, Ferreboeuf and Gold leased rather than owned the land they farmed. While leasing, the couple had looked at buying land in Texas but were overwhelmed by the price — tens of thousands of dollars per acre — plus competition from developers and investors.
“Our real estate agent would say, ‘You have 24 hours to decide if you want to put in an offer,’” Ferreboeuf told The Barbed Wire. “When you’re looking at a piece of property to farm it, there are other considerations that you can’t figure out in 24 hours.”
On top of that: “It’s a big ask for a vegetable farm to pay the mortgage on property that is priced for developers,” Ferreboeuf said.
For Steelbow Farms, the decision to move also hinged on the ability to secure land: They were offered a 99-year lease on protected farmland in New York.
“I’m not saying this with an anti-growth mindset — but in a development boom, many communities and segments of the population aren’t advocated for. And I think farmers and producers are one of those,” said Ferreboeuf. “If people want a vibrant, thriving local food system, farmland has to be protected. We can’t grow food here if we don’t have anywhere left to grow it.”
Losing farmland in Central Texas is a big, urgent problem.
The City of Austin reported that Travis County lost 16.8 acres of farmland every day from 2012 to 2017, or a 5% decrease in total land. Since 2017, that has accelerated to an 11% decrease in acreage. Despite a demand for local food in Austin, the city’s report notes, only about 0.06% of food consumed in Travis County is produced locally.
“Prime farmland is disappearing at a rate that is astonishing,” said Erin Flynn of Green Gate Farms in Central Texas. “This affects you. You just don’t know it’s affecting you.”
Preserving farmland is not a hopeless endeavor. But it’s hard to get people to care about the struggles of farmers. The pressure for change may start with a group of people who have superstar status in today’s culture: chefs.
What’s happening to farmland?
Flynn and her husband Skip Connett started their farm after successful careers in public health. They leased 10 acres by a sewage plant in East Austin, and since their landlord was absent and didn’t care what they did with the land, started an organic farm in 2006. In 2009, the couple bought 32 acres in Bastrop to farm.
“We knew that this area had tremendous value on so many levels. It’s a beautiful place with abundant water and prime soils,” she said, referencing the Blackland Prairie of the region that Texas Parks and Wildlife calls some of the richest soil in the world and rarest landscape in the region.
Each farm faced a different threat to its future.
At the leased East Austin property, Flynn experienced every Texan’s worst nightmare: The land was bought sight unseen by a developer from California. Their new landlord told them to leave the property, and with it the rich soil they had created and the century-old barn they had restored. Flynn refused..
She started a public relations campaign to rally the community and pressure her new landlord into letting the farm stay. She commissioned an oral history of the site’s century-old barn and organized a “barn hug” where people surrounded the barn like it was a tree about to get chopped down. The developer allowed her to operate her farm on four acres and built more than 150 tiny homes on the remaining property. Ironically, the farm the developer tried to erase is now the central hub for the new community.
In Bastrop, Flynn watches prime farmland get bought up by gravel mining companies, which destroy the soil. The state deregulated quarry operations in 2005, and as the gravel mining industry boomed, communities in the Texas Hill Country started reporting environmental impacts like polluted water and dust. Flynn worries about contamination of her groundwater and crops since the mines are so close to her land.
Flynn started Friends of the Land to advocate for preserving the area’s farmland, because, as she explains, farming in Bastrop is a case study for what’s not working for Texas farms.
“Young farmers will come to me and say, ‘I can’t afford land in Austin. I’m gonna move out to the country and that’s gonna solve all my troubles. I’ll be able to get a lot of land,’” Flynn said. “What they don’t realize is that they can’t protect the land around them.” Furthermore, logistics like delivering to restaurants becomes more difficult, making it harder to sell produce.
“Farmers need job security,” Flynn said. “When people are farming, they need to know that where they’re farming is protected. I should be able to go to my city council member and say, ‘A gravel mine is not the highest and best use of this prime farmland that is right near the river.’”
Another example of losing farmland to developers is Springdale Farms. Located in East Austin, Eden East was a lauded open-air restaurant located on the farm, where diners could see the vegetables they were about to eat. Sonya Cote was the chef, and her husband David Barrows took over as head farmer from the farm’s co-founders.
In 2018, the land owners sold to a development company called StoryBuilt that planned to turn the farm into a mixed-use development. Cote and Barrows struck a deal with the developers to farm part of the land and have the restaurant as an anchor tenant.
However, after razing the farm, StoryBuilt went bankrupt during construction. Springdale Farm went from organic vegetable beds to a concrete-covered hole in the ground, tied up in a legal quagmire — with no end in sight. Cote and Barrows ended up filling 18 dump trucks with soil to take out to property they purchased in Bastrop in an attempt to preserve the work they put into the land.
“As Texas prioritizes large-scale commercial development over preserving agricultural land, we risk losing the very farms that sustain us,” said Cote. “If this trend continues, the need to import food will rise, increasing costs, reducing quality, and severing our connection to the land. Protecting our farmers and the ecosystems they cultivate is essential for the future of local
food and farm-to-table dining.”
Chefs need local farms
The news that Steelbow Farms was moving sent chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel into a spiral.
A James Beard Award finalist in 2024 for her East Austin restaurant Birdie’s, Malechek-Ezekiel depended on Steelbow for the fresh, vibrant produce that makes her dishes shine. “We cook really simple food, and if the ingredients aren’t spot on, the dish falls flat,” she explained. “Having something that’s freshly harvested is always going to taste better. It tastes more alive, it tastes more vibrant, it tastes like central Texas, and that comes across in your food.”
Chef Ian Thurwachter opened his East Austin restaurant Intero with the intention of making grassroots change to food systems by supporting local farming and ranching communities. “My wife and I are both from Austin, so we have really deep roots when we’re talking about agriculture,” he said. “We care deeply about the local communities and creating jobs for people is a really big part of why we wanted to open a restaurant.”
However, it requires more work for chefs. Thurwachter describes the ordering process as laborious. With a distributor, he can place an order late at night and get a delivery the next morning. With farms, he has to deal with multiple contacts, who must all be paid separately, have different order minimums, and different delivery dates. He said one farm gets more orders from him simply because they text him instead of making him reply to an email.
Working with farms also requires a commitment to a seasonal and flexible menu, based on what farmers can grow. Many chefs, like Thurwachter and Malechek-Ezekiel, say the creative challenge of working with fresh ingredients is what makes their job fun.
(There is a Texas-based distributor, Farm to Table, that coordinates these logistics between local farmers and restaurants. The chefs I spoke with called it absolutely essential for keeping their restaurant stocked with local products; the farmers had mixed feelings since it doesn’t generate as much revenue for them.)
However, for chefs, these logistical issues are worth it for the connection to community, support for local economies, and superior produce.
If anyone is living the platonic ideal of a farm-to-table restaurant, it’s Cote and Barrows. Their five-acre farm in Bastrop is a mile from Cote’s restaurant, Store House Market & Eatery, which she opened in 2021 after the Eden East disaster. Cote requests the produce she wants from Barrows, who plans crops accordingly.
“We wish people understood that farm-to-table dining is about more than just the food on the
Plate,” Cote and Barrows wrote in an email to The Barbed Wire. “It’s about community, celebration, and connection. Dining in a farm-to-table restaurant is an opportunity to savor real, unadulterated food and to experience the labor of love that goes into growing and preparing it.”
What can the government do?
When COVID-19 and Winter Storm Uri highlighted the frailty of our food supply chains, local governments pushed to source locally and thus preserve farmland.
The project fell to Edwin Marty, food policy manager at the City of Austin. Marty is uniquely suited to lead this initiative, as he was previously an organic farmer before moving into government. He takes the ideals expressed by farmers and turns them into bullet-pointed strategies of policies and funding.
His office, part of the City of Austin’s Office of Climate Action and Resilience, worked with more than 150 community members to put together a comprehensive food plan that included preserving farmland and making ownership accessible. The plan was adopted in October 2024.
The food plan doesn’t accomplish anything on its own. But it’s a way to both get the key community players on the record as invested in this issue and demonstrate to the City Council that its constituents care.
“We view farmland as an opportunity to build stuff. Thinking about it from the other perspective that this land actually has value as farmland requires a policy shift,” he said. Marty says local farms provide positive effects on the environment and climate change. Local agriculture generates jobs and stimulates economies. And farmland contributes to scenic landscape and community character.
“Probably in 10 years, we don’t get to have this conversation (about farmland loss) because it’ll all be gone,” said Marty. “The challenge is getting in front of City Council and saying ‘this is critically important, if this doesn’t happen now, the world’s gonna end.’ And the reality is that there are dozens of other competing priorities.”
There are limits to what the government can do in terms of protecting farmland. It’s difficult for public dollars to incentivize a private business. Furthermore, while regenerative agriculture provides environmental benefits like carbon capturing and improving water, soil, and air quality, Marty points out there are just as many conventional farms doing the opposite. Marty can only move farmland preservation forward by proving it’s for a public good, and having a caveat that farming will provide benefits only if done a certain way makes that tricky.
Still, there have been successes. Marty told me that 40% of the strategies in the plan are moving forward.A former ranch in East Austin is set to become a park that will include community agriculture — Marty dreams of turning this into an incubator farm.
Partnering for a path forward
So what does preserving farmland look like?
Flynn points to the nonprofit Intervale Center in Vermont. In the late ‘80s, the founder of Gardener’s Supply Company purchased 360 acres of land and made it available for organic farming and sustainable use. She wants to create a similar project in Bastrop, but needs community help.
Flynn also believes there should be a regional alliance between chefs and farmers — something that does not currently exist formally — because chefs’ star status could exponentially increase attention on the cause. There aren’t many farms with 10,000 social media followers, but restaurants and chefs can easily have that audience.
Cote has seen success when flexing her platform as a chef. She visited the offices of Texas Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn with the James Beard Advocacy Program to explain the importance of small local farms, and representatives from their offices came down to visit her farm. She’s hoping for legislation to adjust subsidies and agricultural tax exemptions based on farm production, rather than property size.
Still, this is a lot to ask of chefs, who are already operating on razor-thin margins and strapped for time. “I want to help where I can, but I’m also totally buried as a new mom and business owner and I change the menu every day,” said Malechek-Ezekiel.
However, Malechek-Ezekiel feels that preserving farmland and investing in regenerative agriculture is critical for future generations. “I think about our kids and our kids’ future, and I want to make sure it looks bright, healthy, and wholesome for them too. And I feel like if we don’t take control of our communities and support positive change and legislation around that, that it’s not going to look very bright for them.”
Thurwachter added, “Restaurants shouldn’t have to do this. But we’re also so deeply connected to the farms, it just makes sense. It would be really great if people with a lot more money were able to push those dollars or real tangible change in our food systems, but I just don’t see it being the case. So we will try to do the best that we can.”
So whether the answer is chef and farmer partnerships, government action, land donation by private individuals, or all of the above, there are ways to preserve Texas farmland and its bounty for restaurants and the community. “I don’t want this to be a depressing story,” said Flynn. “There’s tremendous opportunity.”
