Report Shows Urbanization Slowing

The pace of urbanization slowed in Ventura County over the last two years, but population growth and new construction continue to chip away at farmland in a county where agriculture is the No. 1 industry, a new state report has found.

The county, the ninth-largest agricultural producer in the state, had 1,713 acres of land reclassified as urban between 1998 and 2000, according to the state Department of Conservation. That compares with the urbanization of 2,369 acres between 1996 and 1998.

But while the loss of county farmland has slowed, it doesn’t mean that development has come to a halt. Another 8,300 acres of mostly agricultural land is targeted for future construction. That land is not included in the state report because it has yet to be built upon, the standard used to measure urbanization.

State officials also point out that Ventura County’s strict growth-control laws, approved by voters in 1998, have not been in place long enough for their effect to be measured in the report.

Overall, the county has lost 15,000 acres of agricultural land since 1984, according to the state. About 123,000 acres of cultivated farmland and 206,000 acres of grazing land remain.

Just how to interpret those numbers, however, is subject to debate.

“I’d be very concerned for Ventura County,” said Erik Vink, who supervised the state report. “It’s one of those places with highly productive agricultural land. There’s so little of it left, and it won’t take long at the rates of conversion the county’s been experiencing in the last decade or so before a significant chunk of that is taken out of production.”

But Bill Fulton, a regional growth expert and president of the Ventura-based consulting group Solimar Research Group, had a different conclusion after analyzing the same data.

“These numbers tell us the land-use controls we’ve had in this county are working and leaving a large amount of land for agricultural uses,” he said.

While it’s true that there’s a little less farmland every year, that’s an inevitable consequence of population growth, Fulton said. The county’s population has been projected to grow from 753,000 to more than 1 million over the next two decades.

What’s important is how that growth is managed, Fulton said. Nationally, the trend is toward sprawl--with about a 20% drop in density since the 1980s and about 3.9 people today per urbanized acre.

But Ventura County’s trend is the opposite. With slow-growth policies focusing development inside city boundaries, he said, urban density in the county is increasing, from 7.61 people per urbanized acre in 1990 to 7.75 by last year. “We’re doing this to hold onto our ag land,” Fulton said.

Meanwhile, new farmland is coming into use even as existing farmland is being urbanized, he said. Over the course of the last two years, for example, state data show that about 1,100 acres of cultivated farmland countywide were urbanized. But during the same time period, 800 acres of previously non-farmed or fallow land were converted to agricultural use. The net effect is that the county lost only about 300 acres of farmland, Fulton said.

At the current rate of depletion, it will be another century before agricultural land runs low enough in Ventura County to threaten the industry’s critical mass, Fulton predicted.

In the near future, globalization of the economy provides a far greater threat to the local agricultural industry than does development, he said.

Rex Laird, director of the county’s farm bureau, agreed. “I’ve looked at the raw numbers and I don’t draw any succinct, profound conclusions from it one way or another,” Laird said of the state report.

“I think what this underscores is that maybe some of the hype on both sides [of the slow-growth debate] has been grossly overplayed. Agriculture is not going to go away any time soon,” he said.

County Supervisor Steve Bennett, architect of the so-called SOAR growth-control laws, said the new development restrictions will help stem the loss of farmland for the next 20 years. But he cautioned against taking for granted the county’s agricultural industry.

“Orange County had one of the most productive agricultural economies in the country, with orange groves and everything else. And it didn’t take 100 years for their industry to collapse,” he said. “The San Fernando Valley was a tremendously rich agricultural valley 30 years ago. That’s gone now. Urban sprawl rates can extrapolate very rapidly and can destroy agriculture in a county very rapidly.”