Can Agrihoods Save Us From Isolating, Cookie-cutter Suburbs?

At Harvest Green, a master-planned community forty minutes west of downtown Houston, homebuyers can pose as farmers, sticking their faces through holes cut into a peep board painted with a cartoonish agricultural scene. The display sits outside the community center, adorned with dried wheat, galvanized milk jugs, and a chalkboard that welcomes you to “The Farmhouse.” Beyond are rustic windmills, decorative silos, and a sculpture of a carrot that, if real, would smash records at the county fair. Even the street signs read like ingredients on a farm-to-table menu: Bright Butternut, Rich Radish, Saucy Sage.

But agrarian life isn’t just a cutesy theme. Harvest Green is home to the Village Farm, where four full-time workers produced 30,000 pounds of USDA-certified organic produce last year. That makes it an “agrihood,” a farm-fresh style of suburban development trending across Texas. On a recent morning, I toured the 12-acre property, from the 1.5-acre vegetable patch, bursting with lettuce and kale, to the two 50-foot-long hoop houses, where squash and tomato vines were strung up in rows as neat as the lines on a page of sheet music. 

There’s even a section where residents can grow their own food. Mary Afolabi, a business major at Houston Community College who moved to Harvest Green five years ago, spends a few hours each day nurturing the twenty-by-twenty-foot plot of tomatoes, cucumbers, and more that she rents for $50 a month, inclusive of classes, equipment, fertilizers, and seeds. But unlike Afolabi, most people in the subdivision’s 2,500 homes don’t get their hands dirty—be it due to hectic schedules or an aversion to worms. The farm runs a Saturday market and offers weekly vegetable deliveries, but only thirty Harvest Green households subscribe. Clayton Garrett of Agmenity, the company contracted by the homeowners association to run the farm, estimates 20 percent of residents interact with the farm in some way on a monthly basis. “Some people just want to run through the farm on their daily exercise path,” he says. “Others just want to show up at Thanksgiving when their relatives are in town and show it off.”  

The lackluster involvement is normal for other agrihoods in the state. But if it initially surprised some developers and farmers, they’ve come to accept it, seeing a community’s farm as another amenity that residents can take or leave. But the most zealous agrihood evangelists among them still envision something more game-changing—which, if ever achieved, would represent a complete reorganization of urban and suburban space around farms.

Developers are always searching for the next big thing that will sell residential projects. In the early 2010s in Texas, “it was all about bigger and flashier water parks,” says Tom Woliver, who then served as a vice president at Hillwood Communities, a development firm founded by Ross Perot Jr. But through Woliver’s role on a leadership committee at the Urban Land Institute, an organization dedicated to the “future of the built environment,” he discovered the agrihood, a development style born in Illinois out of the desire to fight cookie-cutter suburban sprawl. 

Back in the 1970s, conservationists north of Chicago banded together to save 677 acres from being developed into a subdivision. After finally purchasing the land, in 1992 they constructed Prairie Crossing, with 365 homes centered around a working farm and nearly 70 percent of the land preserved as open space. The model has been copied with great success everywhere from Georgia to California. 

To Woliver, it offered the perfect solution for the community that Hillwood was developing on former farmland 45 minutes northwest of downtown Dallas. The 1,200-acre property included an unusable strip in the middle, due to a gas well, and a nineteenth-century farmhouse on flat prairie that the company wasn’t sure what to do with. By moving the house to the strip and seeding a 5-acre farm, Hillwood could kill two birds with one stone, giving Harvest—as the community of 3,200 houses came to be called—a unique identity that paid homage to the rural character of the area. Plus, the sticker price for the farm was just a fifth of the cost of a pool and an even tinier fraction of the cost of a golf course, which can run into the millions.  

“It wasn’t like, ‘We’re gonna do an agrihood because we think it’s the right thing to do,’ ” Woliver says. “It just kind of evolved because it fit what we thought was a good representation of the local community. . . . And everyone likes it—the idea of farming, versus what farming really is.”  

Since then, at least six more agrihoods have been erected across Texas. Another four are in the works, from Pioneer Grove, near Dallas, to Woliver’s latest, Two Step Farm, an eventual four thousand houses in Montgomery County, where 450 hungry goats were recently loosed to munch their way through the understory ahead of construction. Woliver says they’ll remain a regular presence—some for grazing, others for petting, and a few for goat yoga. 

Though agrihoods require a heavier early lift from developers to arrange proper zoning and permitting, they’re often the ticket to getting a project approved, says Daron Joffe, who designed the farm at Harvest Green. Many agrihood farms donate produce to low-income schools and nonprofits. They can educate locals about food and farming. They can increase food security when catastrophes hit; during the COVID-19 pandemic, Harvest Green saw its produce-subscription program double in size. 

They’re also appealing at a time when Texas is losing as much as 887 acres of agricultural land a day, much of it replaced by eyesore subdivisions. The American Farmland Trust predicts another 2.2 million acres will be lost by 2040. And though agrihoods alone can’t address the problem, proponents say they’re a slice of the solution pie, helping preserve some urban farmland, training the next generation of urban farmers, and giving them the necessary experience required to qualify for USDA loans. 

But concern for dwindling farmland isn’t what draws most homebuyers. Instead, Joffe credits agrihoods’ popularity to the fact that people are “yearning” for the farm. He points to the locally grown food movement and rising awareness about the potential health impacts of industrial food production. But beyond the intellectual desire for fresher, traceable food lies a deeper, emotional craving for something that goes missing when people stare at screens all day. And finding it is transformative. “It’s like our human condition really thrives when it has some sun and sweat and soil and plants and birds and nature,” Joffe says. 

Agrihoods sell that connection—or, at least, the possibility of it. They also highlight the tensions between how Texans desire to live and how they actually live, and the ways in which the built environment can influence those choices. 

Before leaving Harvest Green, I drive down a maze of residential streets. The neighborhood is more lush and verdant than many similarly aged subdivisions, but it otherwise follows a standard-issue script, with neutral colors and monolithic garage doors that take up half the facades. The one I visit, a 3,800-square-foot, two-story brick priced at $750,000 by its owner, is a half-hour walk from the farm. (The cheapest home I found for sale in the community is in the $400,000s.) In the backyard, sun spots stain a sad-looking expanse of grass boxed in by a fading wooden fence.

It’s a striking contrast to the 399-square-foot home I visit at Village Farm, a thirty-acre Austin agrihood, where houses start at $166,000. Resident Angela Kopit, a retired special education teacher, left her Victorian manor house in Taylor five years ago and moved here with her husband to be closer to their sons. The “tiny home” doesn’t have a true yard, but on nice days, she slips through the split rail fence on her way to volunteer at Green Gate Farm, the agrihood’s organic farm.

Kopit enjoys starting seedlings in the greenhouse, a “meditative” act that helps her escape the “bombardment of the phone and the endless crap on social media,” she says. Afterwards, in her Wedgwood blue kitchen, she cooks up her reward for volunteering, a bag of fresh vegetables, with whatever Trader Joe’s fare is in her freezer. “Now it’s got, like, five times as much nutrient density,” she says.   

Like at Harvest Green, not everyone participates in the planting, but the farm still seems to draw residents together. Everyone I speak to seems to know everyone else. They practice yoga in the hayloft, take turns feeding (and occasionally reading to) the resident geese, and chat around the firepits at night. Since their houses are small, it’s just easier to hang out outside. Some twenty residents, including Kopit, have met to explore helping Village Farm become a “blue zone,” an area where healthy living leads to longer lifespans. “The farm draws people that have similar values together, so you already have that baseline, these shared values in the way that we approach life,” she says.

After visiting Kopit, I wander into the barn, where farmers Erin Flynn, 62, and Skip Connett, 69, are wrapping up a busy Saturday market. Just a few flowers and potatoes remain. “It’s the kind of day we always dreamed about when we started this place,” Connett says.

It isn’t his first, or even his second, career. Though he grew up on a farm, Connett covered public health as a journalist, then wrote speeches at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Flynn, from a West Texas ranching family, worked in public relations at the American Cancer Society. But Connett craved the more pastoral lifestyle he grew up with. In 2005, the couple left their home in Georgia to be closer to family in Texas and run a farm. A deal on a property in Red Rock fell through, but while driving through Austin, they glimpsed a white farmhouse with a For Lease sign out front. It turned out to be the 1902 homestead of Swedish immigrants Carl and Hilma Bergstrom, for whom Austin’s airport is named. (Matthew McConaughey is also rumored to have shot a student film project at the homestead.)  

The couple farmed ten acres and ran a produce-sharing program with 250 members until 2015, when Arizona-based developer Roberts Communities purchased it and announced an expansion of the nearby RV park. The couple had three months to leave. But when Connett and Flynn proposed an agrihood, a concept they’d learned about while living near Serenbe, a much-lauded agrihood south of Atlanta that Joffe helped create, Roberts agreed. Under their arrangement, the developer would cover the water bill and infrastructure maintenance and pay a monthly operating fee to the farmers, who could keep whatever revenue the farm generated.  

It wasn’t easy for Connett and Flynn to sell their livestock and watch much of their farm get developed. But the benefit of community living quickly proved itself. Before and after the 2021 winter storm hit, residents came out in droves to help cover the crops, remove broken tree limbs, and make repairs.  

This spring, Austin City Council member Natasha Harper-Madison toured the farm, then sponsored a successful resolution directing the city manager to explore promoting more agrihoods in Austin. Flynn spoke at the council meeting, trading the quilted blue work vest she usually wears for a crisp button-down and dangly gold earrings.

“It’s time that agrihoods are made available to everyone,” Flynn said, hinting at the fact that most agrihoods until now have been upscale and inaccessible to families with lower incomes (some also say the term is racially offensive). “Our agrihood demonstrates that well-designed, farm-centered communities can offer affordable housing, they can increase food security, preserve farmland, improve health and well-being, create new careers for farmers, and provide essential services during climate emergencies.” 

The first step toward creating city-led agrihoods is to define what agrihoods are, Flynn says. The Urban Land Institute describes them as “single-family, multifamily, or mixed-use communities built with a working farm or community garden as a focus.” In its recent resolution, the City of Austin wrote that an agrihood is “a planned community that integrates agriculture into a residential neighborhood,” which appears to come from Wikipedia. Otherwise, there’s no official definition in the books. 

In its absence, Flynn worries about developers treating farms as purely decorative, rather than enabling the radical farming and housing revolution she hopes for. “So much of what I’ve seen is not what we’re envisioning,” she says. I see her point when I visit Whisper Valley, another development of eco-friendly, energy-efficient homes in Manor, east of Austin. On the early Saturday morning I visited, I whizzed right past the community gardens and only found them after a resident pointed me in the right direction. (“It’s okay,” she said, summarizing her thoughts on the subdivision.) I had to get back into my car to reach the main garden, where I found a fuzzy black caterpillar chomping on a comfrey leaf. Wearing gray overalls, farmer Fay Pemberton greeted volunteers showing up to work in one of three organic community gardens. Five neighbors arrived to help, though Pemberton sometimes gets as many as fifteen. The garden was beautiful. But does it make Whisper Valley an agrihood? 

Joffe feels similarly to Flynn. “It’s easy to greenwash something, call it an agrihood, and put a token farm in a traditional suburban development,” he says. “That’s not what it’s about to me.”

In his view, agrihoods occupy a spectrum measured by metrics such as sustainability, affordable mixed-income properties, and conservation. Having a farm or community garden in a standard, car-centric subdivision is better than nothing. But creating more conservation-oriented communities requires more innovative planning, design, and development models that follow a pedestrian-oriented, village-style plan.

Some think agrihood farms should be scaled in such a way that they can provide enough produce for every household in their community, which would ensure they aren’t just conversation pieces. Others argue that the smaller equipment used in agrihood farms, like BCS tractors, can’t produce enough food for a large suburban development. What’s more, consumers aren’t even demanding that. 

Despite these competing visions, proponents all agree that zoning laws and other city policies need to catch up to meet developers halfway. There should also be incentives to make agrihoods easier to build, they say, like allowing more density in exchange for conservation. Flynn points to a rule in Davis, California, where developers are required to permanently protect two acres of agricultural land for every one they develop.

“I feel like agrihoods have had a first draft, and it’s time to go well beyond it,” Flynn says. She suggests that the concept can even expand to include older communities, which could be retrofitted as agricultural neighborhoods. “It needs to go to this next phase to make it more accessible to people, and that means it can’t be led by developers.” 

To borrow a metaphor from yoga (with or without goats), the vision of what a great agrihood can or should be is a sort of drishti, a point of focus that planners, developers, and urban farmers hold in view, even as they wobble on shaky legs to reach it. It represents an effort to re-create what’s been lost in the modern era. More and more, doing so means creating communities where life isn’t siloed into categories of food, housing, and transportation, but where everything works in harmonious tandem.  

One day this spring, I stood in a field up the road from Harvest Green, surveying a vibrant half-acre patch of cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash plants fluttering in the wind. In the distance, construction machinery rumbled, pouring roads for Indigo, the 235-acre agrihood that Agmenity’s Garrett and his business partner, Scott Snodgrass, are building through their second company, Meristem Communities. Previously, the land was Houston’s largest organic farm. Then Hurricane Harvey drowned the crops, and Garrett and Snodgrass soon realized the best way to afford having a farm on their property was to build a neighborhood around it.  

By this time next year, the view will include a dense mix of eight hundred homes, ranging from 939-square-foot cottages to 3,000-square-foot houses, with the smallest starting at $210,000. For Snodgrass, raised in suburban Lubbock, it’s important that Indigo be the kind of place where his nine-year-old daughter can roam and explore on foot with her friends. The design replaces every other street with a rectangular park, helping Meristem accomplish its goal of preserving 60 percent of the land as open space.

It’s a truism that food brings people together. But in the end, the appeal of agrihoods like Indigo might lie less in the food than in all that can potentially go with it. If there’s a farm, there’s open space. If it’s thoughtfully planned, it’s easier to walk and become healthier. If you see your neighbors out and about, you’re more likely to find community. And if you have community, you just might have everything.