Rural Texas is increasingly shifting away from working land and into residential and commercial subdivisions, and the people working the remaining rural lands are changing as well.
A report published this week by the Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute measures land trends in rural Texas over the 15-year period between 1997 and 2012. It finds that while white farm operators have decreased since the end of the 90s, more Hispanics and African-Americans are operating farms.
Women farm owners grew over the same period as well. One in eight farms in 1997 were run by women; by 2012, that ratio was one in five.
