In a brand-new neighborhood in Martin County, residents stop by shared garden beds on the way back from soccer games to harvest potatoes for dinner. They gather under string lights to listen to concerts while surrounded by sunflowers.
This verdant space is an “agrihood”: a term coined by a Southern California developer in 2014 to market a neighborhood built around a farm.
While the name might be new, the concept, of course, is ancient.
Agrihoods emulate the food-centric layouts of the earliest agricultural communities in Mesopotamia, China and South America. They share the “back to the land” goal of the intentional communities and ecovillages that gained popularity in the 1960s and ‘70s, but cater to a 9-to-5 crowd.
They mesh a community garden ethos with a master-planned scale and price point, offering fresh produce and farmer’s markets within walking distance of new builds. But while food system researchers praise agrihoods’ efforts to shift the local food ethic, they caution these agrarian oases can’t do it alone.
Farm living without farming
The idea of raising kids and crops side-by-side isn’t new.
Urban farms from Seattle to Miami have established thriving local food systems in bustling city centers for decades.
Detroit’s urban agriculture scene, one of the most prominent in the country, started in the 1890s and now includes about 2,200 farms and gardens, according to reporting by Planet Detroit. Greens, fruit trees and even fish farms fill formerly vacant lots. The city appointed its first Urban Ag Director, Tepfirah Rushdan, in 2023.
“Especially after COVID, [...] people wanted to find more ways to grow food for themselves and be more sustainable,” Rushdan said when the city announced her role. “We could close the ecosystem to where we’re producing the food that we need as a city.”
Agrihoods scale that approach to the subdivision level.
The developments range from a few homes around a community garden to thousands surrounding dozens of acres of farmland.
In some designs, residents plant and harvest their own food community-garden-style or tend to individual beds in shared spaces. In others, developers use HOA dues or other community fees to hire farm contractors to manage the groves and fields, allowing residents to enjoy the fruits without the labor.
The advantage of farmer-managed agriculture over a community garden is reliable maintenance, said University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Science extension agent Cynthia Nazario-Leary.
“Nobody wants to pull the weeds, make sure things are put to bed during the hot summer,” she said. “If you have a breakout of pests or diseases, nobody wants to deal with that either.”
“ There's some projects where the farm is really kind of built into the identity and the narrative of the community,” said Justin Myers, chief operating officer of Agmenity, a Houston-based company that designs, installs and manages farm facilities. “For other projects, the farm is really one amenity of several,” he said. The firm works on agrihood projects throughout Florida, including the Angeline Farm in Land O'Lakes and the Newfield Farm in Palm City.
It’s a popular one, said Andy Salafia, who directs marketing for a real estate development firm designing a 2,240-acre agrihood near the St. Johns River in Clay County.
“If you're looking for homes, specifically new construction homes, you're guaranteed to have a resort style pool, probably a clubhouse, probably fitness, probably trails, you know, all these things that are almost becoming a check mark,” Salafia said, “But the agrihood component brings together the community in a way that I think people are really searching for.”
The company, Freehold Communities, took over a development in Summerville, South Carolina, in 2022 and added ag amenities this May. Since then, “we've had over 250 sales,” Salafia said. “It’s just almost catching fire.”
Crews broke ground for the “Saratoga Springs” agrihood in Clay County in January and plan to start construction on model homes in 2026. Designs include nearly 4,500 homes.
Nearby, a longtime landowner conceived of another, 3,200-acre agrihood. But it’s unclear if BTI partners, the developer who purchased the family land, will honor that vision. Though the company’s designs preserve more than half of the development’s acreage as open space, it has also floated plans for a golf course or age-restricted subdivision in place of farmland.
Those builds, plus more traditional developments, aim to bring 10,000 homes along the recently completed First Coast Expressway spanning Duval, Clay and St. Johns counties.
Agrihoods spreading far and wide
The most recent count, done in 2018, estimated 200 agrihoods in 28 states.
One of the first was Serenbe: an agrihood that predates the term in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia. Built in 2004, Serenbe hides houses, businesses and a 25-acre organic farm in a forested nook southwest of Atlanta.
The development directly employs its farm manager, Brandi Whitney, rather than contracting outside management. Farmers markets, restaurant sales and produce subscriptions support the farm’s operations.
Whitney manages a greenhouse, three greenhouse-like tunnels and 11 field blocks, each with three, 50-foot beds. “This year we probably sold almost everything, if not everything that we produced,” Whitney said.
Is demand growing? “Absolutely,” she said.
Hal Knowles agreed.
Despite the lack of recent data on agrihoods, “I definitely feel like interest in them is on the rise,” said the undergraduate coordinator and lecturer in Sustainability and the Built Environment at the University of Florida.
The design style is taking root in Florida with subdivisions sprouting in Palm Beach County, Tallahassee, Orlando and Archer.
Two contractors, Agmenity and Convivial Foodscapes, help design or support many of their farms.
Carmen and Tripp Eldridge, married Peace Corps alums, lead the latter. They entered the agrihood industry through Arden: South Florida’s first farm-centered development. The pair, both versed in sustainable agriculture, became the neighborhood’s farm managers in 2018.
They’re involved in the farms at Flint Rock in Archer and Saratoga Springs, too, spanning a 96-home to multi-thousand home scale.
Before planting seeds, “we take soil and water tests so we know what we're getting into,” Carmen said. “Then we use different organic fertilizers and amendments to get the land into the right place.”
Once the soil is set, the pair plants a variety of vegetables guided by pest and disease resistance and resident preferences.
“We do some novel things, but we tend to stick to things that people use the most frequently in their kitchens,” she said. “We go heavy on potatoes and onions.”
Carmen and Tripp track what sells to refine their selections, which sometimes leads to surprises. Residents loved moringa, a plant native to northern India used in oils, powders and teas, and galangal, a ginger look-alike with a more piney and peppery taste, when the pair planted them at Arden.
“We can get really creative,” Carmen said.
Carmen and the Agmenity leader, Myers, often find themselves correcting the assumption that their farms are designed to feed the whole neighborhood.
“Sometimes people will say ‘we have 1,500 homes, how are you growing food for everyone?’” Myers said. “Well, we're not growing food for everyone, it's a resource in different ways.”
Some residents may routinely pick up produce while others may only interact with the farm by admiring it during their morning run, he said. Others, still, could volunteer at its workdays or rent it as an event space.
Converting the countryside
Agrihoods in Florida often carry a certain irony: their farm-focused communities replace farmland.
Most new builds in Florida do. Last year, developments replaced 72,000 acres of Florida farmland, more than 35 times the size of the University of Florida campus.
The agrihood style prioritizes natural lands and often includes conservation areas or easements, but, like any development, paves over wilds or wetlands to create houses, roads and other amenities.
In the 3,200-acre Newfield agrihood in Martin County, “over 70% of those acres are conserved or preserved in some way,” Myers said.
Agrihood supporters say building residents’ food consciousness offers additional environmental benefits.
“Society is in many ways disconnected from farming,” Myers said. “Part of our goal is building that understanding of ‘what does seasonality mean around food?’ Of, ‘well why don't we have tomatoes year round?’”
About 1 to 2% of the U.S. labor force works in agriculture today, down from approximately 40 to 50% between 1880-1900. “We've kind of let industry take that over for us, and I think we've forgotten a lot of those ancestral wisdom traditions,” he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed migration patterns between urban and rural communities, though not to the extent of an “urban exodus” popularized in the media.The rural growth between 2020 and 2023 came from rural residents staying in the countryside more so than city dwellers arriving, according to research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Still, rural growth coupled with a booming interest in backyard gardening created favorable conditions for agrihoods.
“I don’t think this is a fad,” said Salafia, the marketing director for the developer behind Saratoga Springs. She thinks it’s a lifestyle homebuyers will come to expect.
But not everyone can afford to live in an agrihood, said UF’s Knowles, and popularizing a local food approach requires public policy changes in addition to private efforts.
If consumers keep choosing processed, pre-packaged foods over locally grown produce, agrihoods probably won’t take off, he said. “You'll have these little niche areas where people that really, really want this sort of back-to-the-land approach will choose to live in these communities if they can afford them, but it will never really scale.”
Amenities, including farms, drive up living costs in master-planned communities. Whether through the price of the house itself or HOA dues, residents pay for their resources.
Price points for agrihood homes vary widely by region and developer. Homes in Carnes Crossroads in South Carolina, developed by the same business as Saratoga Springs planned for Clay County, range from $300,000 to over $600,000. Lot prices at Flint Rock, the agrihood in Archer, start at $263,000.
“We have yet to work with a farm amenity for low income housing, but I certainly feel like that's a possibility,” Myers said.
It’s already happening in Tampa Bay.
In 2018, the Tampa Housing Authority put out a call to transform an empty two acre lot in the middle of the Encore District: a historically Black community just north of downtown whose clubs and bars drew musical icons including Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday in the ‘40s.
It aimed to bring urban agriculture to a growing “mixed-income housing” neighborhood with subsidized and market-rate apartments.
Farmers and friends Joe Dalessio and Travis Malloy got the gig –and a $350,000 grant– and opened Mecham Urban Farm in 2021.
Dalessio doesn’t consider the area an agrihood, per se, because his farm operates independently from the housing that surrounds it, but being “smushed in the neighborhood” makes it easy to feed the community.
The farm grows about 60,000 pounds of produce per year and its store sells products from about 20 other Florida farms, too.
“It's something that I didn't quite understand when I first started,” Dalessio said, “But it's just a really beautiful community that we're able to build at the farm.”
