Austin's Local Food Insufficiency

Local Food Insufficiency

The Austin/Travis County Food Plan 2024 was published a few months ago. According to this study, locally grown food comprises less than 1% of the food consumed in Austin. More specifically, we are importing 99.94% of our food from out of the county: only 0.06% of food consumed in Travis County is grown in Travis County - even though Travis County has almost 200,000 acres of farmland. 

I was reading an essay recently on resilience in the face of various emergencies, and it recommended that people form communities with their neighbors and create barter systems with those they know. But it’s hard to barter for necessities if nobody is producing food. And it can take anywhere from months to years to begin food production (just for example, chickens need to be 6 months old to start laying eggs). If the city of Austin ever got cut off from food “imports” (by which I mean trucks coming in from anywhere outside the county), we’d all be in deep trouble. I imagine that lack of food might be one of the top reasons for riots and societal breakdown. Let’s not go there.

Nature Towns are designed exactly for that sort of scenario, and Nature Farms are the stepping stone. At Holocia, we are actively developing Community Financed Solutions (CFS) to transform our food system from toxic to regenerative. If you would like to learn more about Nature Farms and follow our progress, please click below to sign up for our new newsletter service. We will be transitioning soon from this current service to a new one.