Native Floridians: defending Florida’s farms

By James Williams

Dallas Townsend was born February 12, 1939, at the first Lee Memorial Hospital in Fort Myers, the old one that used to be on Cleveland Avenue.

 “I was almost born on the reservation,” he said, referring to the old Seminole Indian reservation at the end of the east county line of Hendry County, about 16 miles north of the Miccosukee gas station on Alligator Alley. “Mom went into labor out there, and Junior Cyprus drove her all the way to the hospital, in a 1932 flathead Ford V8 pickup,” he laughed. “No roads!”

   The old Florida Townsend remembers did have roads, in a sense, but not like what we understand of roads today. “‘Woods roads’ is what we called ‘em,” he said. “You may have known two tire tracks through the woods, that’s what we had. They had a two-tire track road from Felda through Alva.” 

   Townsend grew up on the McDaniel’s Ranch in Hendry County during the 1940s. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1960, became the Collier County Extension Agent in 1965, and then became the Hendry County Extension Agent in June 1979. He held that position for 24 years, until his retirement in 2003. His surplus of knowledge on the agriculture industry and its history in Southwest Florida leads many of his stories and explanations to begin with “let’s go back a little”: Usually, a little means the 1860s.

“The Ag industry has been an enhancement to the environment, ” Townsend said. ” If you knew what once was, compared to what is today, then you would know that the game is more plentiful, and flooding is a lot less common.”

 According to the University of Florida’s Institution of Food and Agriculture Science website, 41 percent of Florida’s land, that’s 14.25 million acres, is prone to flooding. During Florida’s urbanization boom of the 1920s, the government along with land developers sought to make Florida more habitable for urban development, and according to the UF/IFAS website, controlling the floods through farmland became the practical and economical solution to flooding. Famers would pump water out of the land through canals and pumps, making the land habitable for crops. However, until the 1940s research was not being done on Florida’s nutrient deficient soil. This meant that vast plots of land were cleared for ag, cultivated, and after a few years abandoned for more fertile soil to continue growing. This cleared and floodless land would usually be developed for housing or urban sprawl after the farmers left.

 “After the University of Florida did research on the soil, the farmers came in and learned how to lime the ground, and then when they moved they put grass over it. After that, the cattle really thrived, and so did the game.” He said that if you weren’t careful roping cattle before this time, you risked breaking their legs due to their lack of essential nutrients.

In a matter of almost 30 years, the Ag industry created flood free land, gave it the nutrients it needed to produce sustainable vegetation for cattle, wildlife, and vegetation, and ultimately allowed developers to utilize land that was already cleared, without having to destroy any more natural undeveloped land.

“We haven’t given our citizens a good education on that factor.” He said on his concern for the future of Agriculture in southwest Florida. “It makes you sad that we got people so ignorant. They don’t care where their food comes from, they just want it when they buy it.” 

He says another aspect the Ag industry has done a poor job of is getting across to the public the fact that they enjoy the cheapest food supply in the world. 

“The last number I saw was we spent about 11 percent of our disposable income on food, less than any other country in the world,” Townsend said. “We went from wearing the white hat to the black hat. We were blamed for a lot of the environmental issues. A lot of the things the farmers did was because of the government’s behest. That’s why the ‘Glades got developed. The government wanted that land economically productive.” 

Farmers, Townsend said, are, by nature, some of the most practical environmentalists. They depend solely on a healthy environment to do their jobs. 

“A lot of our mistakes have been solved through research, going back to 1860s. You don’t have the serious mistakes we made, way back when,” Townsend said.” We’ve made a lot of progress, turning non-productive land, into productive land, even for the wildlife.”

Since 1994, the Florida Agriculture and Consumer Services department has issued the Agriculture Environment Leadership Award, which according to their website, spotlights environmentally innovative farming and ranching practices. This year the five finalists for the award are all farmers and ranchers have used cutting edge technology to reduce fertilizer output, and save millions of gallons of water. 

For example, Wild Goose Farms uses an irrigation technology that specifically monitors certain areas, so that the farmers are able to tell precisely how much water each area needs, instead of using an irrigation system that waters everything the same, saving thousands of gallons of water in the process.

 Another finalist, Blackbeard farms, has issued with the Agricultural Conservation Easement program to keep over a third of their farmland preserved in its natural state. The Agriculture Conservation Easement Program is a program which allows farmers to keep and manage natural land rather than developing it. 

For farmers and ranchers, these practices of conservation and sustainability help lower the costs of producing crops, as well as lessen their impact on the environment. Without the land, there would be no farmers, and without farmers, there would be no food. This incentive is essential for any member of the Agriculture industry to help preserve our environment.