But when the Elgin City Council took a hard look at the city to define is strengths and assets a couple of years ago, farming was not identified as one of Elgin's core strengths. In fact, a lot of citizens saw agriculture as an impediment to the city's economic growth. Elgin city council member Stacy Van Landingham said agriculture was somehow cast as a villain by some people.
"The idea was that agriculture was taking up all this land and wasn't contributing much to the economy," Van Landingham said. "Some of us saw it differently. We saw agriculture as one of the city's assets. Some of us started meeting informally for breakfast and just talking things over, trying to get some ideas about how to tie agriculture into an overall community development plan."
Van Landingham talked to some area growers, like Wayne Lund of Lund Produce, to get an idea of what kind of support local growers needed. The city contracted with Holistic Management International, which agreed to work with Elgin as part of its "Ag Town Turnaround" program. As Van Landingham noted, "We were already following that model."
A graduate student working for the Sustainable Food Center in Austin mapped the area in relation to agriculture and discovered a surprising number of organic and sustainable farmers and grass-fed livestock producers. In January, the city received a $10,000 grant from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) center in Georgia, which also asked the city to do pretty much what it had already done.
The Agriculture Work Group, formed as part of the requirements for the SARE Grant, met for the first time in October and drew a large crowd. Elgin community development director Amy Miller said response to the focus on agriculture has been strong, both at public meetings and in an online survey.
"We have a group of interested citizens who are actively involved with this," Miller said. "They're interested in what we're doing and they want to help."
One of the beneficiaries of the city's focus on agriculture has been the River City Farmer's Market, which serves growers from Elgin, Bastrop, Smithville and the surrounding area. The market has 38 members, according to president Eileen Niswander and is open in Smithville on Thursday from 1 p.m. until sold out and in Elgin on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The market isn't new -- this is its 26th year -- but it has recently taken on a higher profile within the community.
Eileen Niswander, president of the market for the last two-and-half years, said it's a growers market. She said the city has worked with the market to secure a better location at a downtown park and has okayed but not yet funded a new pavilion-like structure.
"It's a unique market in that it's a growers-only market," she said. "There is no resale. You have to grow it or make it to sell it here. You can sell for other vendors, like with some of the honey and hot sauce sales. We sell pecan oil from a company in Louisiana, but they're a member of the market, too."
The Capital Area Council of Governments recently awarded the city a grant as part of the Sustainable Places Project, which Miller said the city will use to help manage growth along both sides of a booming and expanding U.S. Highway 290. "It (the grant) gives us a way to control growth, and to make sure the land that's developed is developed wisely," she said.
"People know that Austin has a strong food culture and a lot of producers," Van Landingham said. "We're very mindful of that. We discovered that we have a lot of that right here and a good market here. We think this is a good time to highlight and support what farmers here do."
