The old barn on King Ranch, Wyoming, took 36 hours to build in the early 1900s. It was build to house one United States’ first shipments of Corriedale sheep.

RED barns are being turned into high rise apartments at a rapid rate across the United States, with the beef industry now trying to find ways of preventing a “runaway sprawl” scenario.

The situation was one of the main topics at the recent US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef conference in Fort Worth, Texas. Alongside neighbouring Dallas, Fort Worth is one of the country’s most rapidly sprawling cities, with the Dallas-Fort Worth “metroplex” home to 8m people as of July last year.

Audacious Agriculture principal Stuart Austin.

New South Wales-based asset manager and advisor Stuart Austin, who was at the USRSB conference said Fort Worth’s sprawl into farmland was stark.

“In Texas alone they are losing 1023ac per day,” he said. “So, there was deep conversation around ensuring the livestock industry played a key role in the discussion around how land use change is managed effectively to ensure the needs are met of all stakeholders.”

“We went for a walk down one street where they were building new condos and you could see there was one spare block in-between them that still had crop rows on it.”

Much of the discussion centred around a report called “Farms Under Threat 2040” prepared by the American Farmland Trust, which highlighted how the US was losing 2000ac of farmland/day – with housing, conservation and renewable energy all competing hard for land with farming.

Mr Austin said the sprawl was happening across the country, with similar issues around Denver Colorado.

“There is nothing stopping the urban encroachment with whole suburbs being built annually on cropland and nothing in the way of the continuous spread,” he said,

“I asked an institution who was converting desertified citrus orchards in California into solar farms ‘at what point does power become more important than food production?’.”

AFT put forward three scenarios that could prevail:

• Business as usual – where the same rate of development continues and a further 18.4m acres is lost.
• Runaway sprawl – where the rate of sprawl is accelerated by housing prices driving people out of cities, more pressure to work from home and a lack of planning could result in 24.4m ac lost.
• Better built cities – where Governments work together to prioritise land use and make cities more liveable and reduce sprawl to 11m acres.

Urban sprawl a major issue

Urban sprawl is one of the US beef industry’s most talked about issues, with industry bodies and television shows like Yellowstone consistently addressing the urban sprawl.

Protection of grazing lands was a pet policy under the former National Cattleman’s Beef Association president Mark Eisele.

Mr Eisele’s ranch outside the small Wyoming city of Cheyenne neighbours Microsoft, Walmart, a major interstate highway, the local water treatment plant and a housing estate.

Cheyenne is about two-hours’ drive north Denver, with housing estates scattered through paddocks for most of that drive. He opened his gates for last year’s Societal Role of Meat conference, which Beef Central attended.

• To read more about how the Eisele family is dealing with the urban sprawl click here