COUNTY WIDE TH U RS DA Y , JUN E 2 , 20 16
YOUR HOME AND FAMILY NEWS FROM ALL OF KENDALL COUNTY
KendallCountyNow.com
COUNTY’S AGRICULTURAL LAND DISAPPEARING Thousands of new homes have sprouted up in what used to be farm fields in Kendall County over the past two decades. By ROGER MATILE
news@kendallcountynow.com
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n the five years between 2007 and 2012, Kendall County lost more farmland – 37,131 acres – to development than it had in the previous 57 years combined. In all the years between 1950 and 2007, the county lost 28,356 acres to development. The disappearance of county agricultural land was only one of the results reported in the 2012 Census of Agriculture, published in 2014 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Given the frenetic pace of growth in the county during the first decade of the 21st century, losing farmland to residential and commercial development shouldn’t have come as a surprise. An April 15, 2004, story in the Kendall County Record noted that the U.S. Census Bureau reported that between 2000 and 2003, Kendall had, in percentage terms, been the 10th fastest growing county in the nation. During that four-year period, the county’s population shot up by 22 percent. The very next year, the Census Bureau released another study of estimated popula-
Report details changes to area farms from 2007-2012 tion gains and in that one it was announced Kendall’s population had ballooned yet again, gaining another 8 percent in population in the previous year, making it the second fastest growing county in the nation, losing out only to Flagler County, Florida. Largely rural Flagler County, located on Florida’s east coast just north of Daytona Beach, is about one and a half times Kendall County’s size in land area. During the next few years, Kendall and Flagler swapped places as the fastest growing counties in the U.S. Then in 2008, a Kendall County Record story by John Etheredge and Tony Scott reported the Census Bureau had announced that between 2000 and 2007, Kendall had been the fastest growing county in the nation, its population increasing by a robust 77.5 percent, just edging out Flagler County, which grew
by 77.4 percent during the same period. When the residential and commercial real estate bubble that had been inflated by complex financial schemes finally popped in 2008, local development largely stopped due to the resulting worldwide financial crash. While some of the already subdivided but unimproved land could still be farmed, many more acres had been improved with curbs and gutters, paved streets, storm and sanitary sewers, water mains and fire hydrants, and the rest of the infrastructure awaiting new homes and businesses, removing them from the county’s stock of tillable land. According to the USDA, there are 205,171 acres of land in Kendall County. In 2012, 129,741 acres were being farmed, down sharply from the 166,872 acres being farmed in 2007, the year before the develop-
Eric Miller - emiller@shawmedia.com
ment bubble burst. The largest amount of agricultural land lost to development previous to the five years between 2007 and 2012 had been the 8,318 acres lost between 1992 and 1997.
Number of farms continues to decline
In keeping with a trend measured in previous farm censuses, the number of Kendall County farms continued to decline in the most recent farm census. The farm census counted 364 farms in Kendall County in 2012, down from the 424 reported in 2007. The 2012 figure totaled only about a third of the 1,086 farms recorded in the 1950 farm census. But reversing another trend that saw fewer, larger farms being created in many previous farm censuses, the 2012 census reflected a continuing decline that began with the 2007 farm census. That year, the size of an average county farm declined from 408 acres in 2002 to 394 acres. In 2012, the size of the average farm declined once again, this time to 356 acres. The average Kendall County farm
See FARMLAND, page 5