"Boutique" farms feeding agricultural resurgence

Small farms are spreading across the national landscape, selling their wares directly to consumers concerned about where their food comes from and the environment.

The trend is taking root in Hillsborough County, where small farms have helped expand the county's amount of cropland by 15 percent since 2003 - even despite losing substantial acreage to the mid-decade housing boom.

"There has been a resurgence of people wanting to get back to the land," said Stephen Gran, who promotes homegrown agriculture for Hillsborough County.

For a while, it looked as though Hillsborough County's farmland was primed to vanish beneath the treads of developers' bulldozers.

As builders drove up the value of undeveloped property, landowners across eastern and northern Hillsborough pulled nearly 100,000 acres of pasture, groves and cropland out of agricultural use as they prepared the way for new subdivisions, strip malls and office parks.

Now that the housing bubble has burst, though, many of those owners have begun returning their land to agricultural uses. The amount of land in Hillsborough used for farming has grown steadily since 2007, reaching nearly 178,000 acres this year, according to the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser's Office.

That's still a far cry from the days before the local housing market went crazy. In 2003, for example, Hillsborough farmers had 236,500 acres - more than a third of the land in Hillsborough County - devoted to agricultural uses.

It's unclear if an urbanizing county such as Hillsborough will ever see the kind of large-scale farming it had in the past, said Don Buckloh, a spokesman with the American Farmland Trust, which works to preserve rural lands and promote sustainable farming.

But farming is coming back - driven by higher commodity prices and consumers' demand for locally grown produce.

John Lawson is one of those back-to-the-landers. Larson, a former beer salesman, started a hydroponic farm in Ruskin six years ago. He grows everything from strawberries to turnips and sells them directly to customers.

Lawson said he grows six acres worth of crops on a single acre of land.

"We read an article about this style of growing and thought it was a great idea," Larson said. "We're big on buying local."

Small-scale farms have helped stanch the loss of agricultural land nationwide, as has the housing crash, Bukloh said.

Florida newest bumper crop - foreclosed homes - may ultimately prove a major boon to the state's farmland by dramatically reducing the need to pave over green lands, said Jim Hanley, executive vice president of the Florida Cattlemen's Association.

"It will be slow to build back to the pace that it once was," Hanley said.

Hillsborough's pastureland suffered the sharpest decline at the hands of building-boom speculation, dropping from nearly 150,000 acres in 2003 to about half that in 2005. Since then, landowners have put nearly 40,000 acres back into pasture.

That may not exactly signal a resurgence in agriculture, though. Andrew Meadows, a spokesman for Florida Citrus Mutual, a consortium of citrus growers based in Lakeland, dismissed the growth in pastureland as land speculation just waiting to happen again.

"Cattle and pastureland is often a land play," Meadows said. "Citrus is a job."

The citrus industry has been hit harder than any other agricultural operation in Hillsborough County.

While other land uses are recovering from their 2005 lows, citrus continues to decline, county records show. In 2003, Hillsborough had nearly 50,000 acres dedicated to citrus. This year, that figure is less than 20,000 acres.

Hurricanes, freezes and disease have battered the local citrus industry, driving most commercial citrus farming farther south in the state, Meadows said.

There are some signs that local growers are replanting their trees, but few are turning virgin land into groves, he said.

Meadows is reluctant to write off citrus entirely in the Tampa Bay area. He points to the blueberry market, which went from nothing to a big deal in less time than you can say "antioxidant."

So, will citrus rise again in Hillsborough County?

"It's unlikely," Meadows said. "But I'm not going to say it's not going to happen."