Texas is known throughout the world for its vast rural landscapes and agricultural heritage, yet much of the state’s population is concentrated in urban and suburban areas surrounding cities such as Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio. Many of these cities developed as important centers of trade, transportation and agriculture, and their continued outward growth is reshaping the surrounding landscape.
Today, Texas’s privately owned working lands, including farms, ranches and forests, encompass approximately 139 million acres, or 81 percent of the state’s total land area. It’s the stewardship of these lands that benefits all Texans by supporting environmental quality, supplying food and other natural resources, and sustaining rural communities and economies.
This foundational observation, with nods to Aldo Leopold’s prolific writings on the responsible stewardship and conservation of our natural areas and the intrinsic value they provide to the broader public, is the basis of NRI’s Texas Land Trends program. Several interconnected factors highlighted throughout the program, including rapid population growth, contribute to land fragmentation and the conversion of working lands to nonagricultural uses, showing an outward expansion from urban areas.
Now, rising land values and an aging population of farmers and ranchers have created a combination of pressures that drive the division of large properties into smaller parcels or the conversion of working lands for uses such as residential development. These changes reduce and alter the ecosystem services provided by farms, ranches and forests and other open spaces each day. The bottom line is that the way Texans balance growth with the conservation of working lands will shape the future of the state’s open spaces.
Tools for decision-making and understanding areas at risk in Texas
As natural resource stewards, an important first step is understanding where fragmentation and conversion are most likely to occur next. This insight can guide knowledgeable conversations about conservation strategies, educational outreach and land-use planning. In 2020, we developed the first Fragmentation Risk Index map, identifying counties with a higher likelihood of fragmentation or conversion using Texas Land Trends data. As we’d expect, one of the clearest patterns appears across the Texas Triangle, including counties within and surrounding the Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas.
This year, we went back to the map with the latest 5-year data set and watched as the state continued to shapeshift to support changing landscapes and populations. The latest Texas Land Trends index shows the highest-risk category expanding along metropolitan edges and in several rural regions, even as the overall footprint of elevated risk remains largely unchanged. Texas’s farms, ranches and forests continue to experience pressure from population growth, rising land values and changes in agricultural ownership. From 2017 to 2022, the data tells us that Texas converted more than 1.8 million acres of designated working lands and more than 17,000 farm and ranch operations.
This updated Texas Land Trends fragmentation risk index provides the same county-level view of where these pressures are most likely to contribute to the division of larger working lands into smaller parcels or their conversion to nonagricultural uses. The map retains a prominent pattern of elevated risk throughout the Texas Triangle, including counties within and surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston. The updated map also reveals the highest levels of risk extending farther into counties along the edges of major metropolitan regions and into portions of the Hill Country, East Texas, Central Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.
Reading the fragmentation risk index
The index serves as a useful planning and screening tool by highlighting where multiple pressures occur together at the county level. The index combines four equally weighted indicators associated with land fragmentation and conversion:
Average farm size
Change in market value per acre
The prevalence of producers age 65 or older
Projected population growth from 2020 to 2060
Each indicator is assigned a value from 1 to 5, and the four values are averaged to create the county’s overall fragmentation risk score. Higher scores indicate a greater convergence of conditions associated with fragmentation risk. The previous index used the same general framework, combining 2017 operation size and producer age data, land market value changes from 1997 to 2017 and population projections from 2020 to 2070.
What we learned: More counties enter the highest-risk class
A county-by-county comparison to the previous index shows that most of the state remained in the same risk class between the two maps. Of Texas’s 254 counties:
175 remained in the same class
45 moved into a higher-risk class
34 moved into a lower-risk class
The most significant shift occurred at the upper end of the index. The number of counties in the highest-risk class increased from 41 in 2017 to 56 in 2022, a nearly 37 percent increase. The next-highest class declined from 91 counties to 75. Together, the two highest classes included 132 counties in 2017 and 131 in 2022. The geographic extent of elevated risk remained about the same, while more counties within that area moved into the most severe category.
County-level shifts
Eighteen counties advanced from the second-highest class into the highest. They included Hood and Rockwall counties near Dallas-Fort Worth; Kendall, Kerr and Gillespie counties in the Hill Country; Lee and Burleson counties east of Austin; Liberty and Walker counties near Houston; Atascosa County south of San Antonio; and Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley.
Colorado, Fayette and Gonzales counties moved down from the highest class into the next-highest class.
Collin, Denton and Parker counties received the maximum 2022 index score of 5. All three are located within or along the expanding Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region.
At the other end of the index, six West Texas counties received the lowest score of 1.25: Crockett, Culberson, Pecos, Sterling, Upton and Ward.
Land value pressure reaches beyond population centers
Some of these changes seemed inevitable as our population continues to grow; they were simply already on a trajectory to expansion. We wouldn’t be scientists, though, without continuing to ask questions about other changes we observed, so we looked to the individual indicators that help explain why fragmentation risk can be elevated beyond the state’s fastest-growing counties.
Change in market value per acre was the most consistently high factor in the 2022 data. Of the state’s 254 counties, 188 received a market value index of 4 or 5, including 145 counties assigned the maximum value of 5. Projected population growth was more geographically concentrated: 61 counties received a population growth index of 4 or 5, while 152 received the lowest value of 1.
This combination confirms that rapid population growth remains a central driver around metropolitan areas, while rising land values, smaller operation sizes and an aging agricultural producer population can increase fragmentation risk in rural counties experiencing more modest population change.
Using the map to anticipate change
We know that fragmentation can affect the long-term economic viability of agricultural operations while reducing the amount of connected open space available for wildlife habitat, water conservation and other ecosystem services. Especially in the wake of challenges like water availability and the threat of New World Screwworm, fragmentation increases the complexity of coordinating land management across a growing number of ownerships at a time when collaboration among conservation partners and landowners is critical for landscape-scale stewardship. The updated index can help conservation organizations, agricultural professionals, local governments and community planners identify places where proactive landowner outreach, succession planning, conservation programs, and informed development decisions may have the greatest value in keeping healthy working lands intact.
