From Corn to Chips: Rural views from inside Central Texas’ emerging techno-industrial corridor

Abstract

Amidst a changing climate, mitigating the loss of prime agricultural lands are of major concern for maintaining global food security without compromising planetary thresholds. Yet, often proximate to metropolitan areas, prime farmlands are highly susceptible to degradation and development. Central Texas is a hotspot for urban sprawl, development of suburbs, and the rapid conversion of agricultural lands into other uses. Furthermore, sites on urban peripheries in Texas and the American South are increasingly targeted for novel techno-industrial development for semiconductor fabrication, renewable energy deployment, electric vehicle production, and datacenter siting. Williamson County uniquely embodies these trends as home to an emerging techno-industrial corridor anchored by firms like Tesla and Samsung. Stemming from promised benefits like job creation and economic stimulation, these firms are the beneficiaries of public incentives packages unprecedented in Texas state history.The success of firms in Williamson County hinges on the ability of local government to make available the requisite land, infrastructure, and resources, a process which occurs largely in a “black box”. Discourse from local and county officials normalizes this economic development as both natural and desirable progress, while making little room for the perspectives of rural communities where techno-industrial facilities are being sited. Utilizing GIS analysis, archival research, and interviews with farmers, landowners, and other key informants, this research demonstrates patterns of land use change associated with new development typologies, reveals historic precedents that accelerate present-day acquisitions of farmland, and identifies a myriad of uneven legal, financial, and environmental pressures leveraged to “clear the way” for the techno-industrial development of rural areas. This research utilizes scholarship on land use/land cover change, agri-food regimes, and neoliberal natures to contextualize historical precursors to development and the impact of socio-natures being displaced and produced in rural Williamson County. This thesis argues that rural siting allows firms to operate in obscurity and to exercise public powers unavailable to them otherwise through unprecedented articulations of public-private partnerships. Findings reveal not only broad patterns of land use change, but also the mechanisms by which rural land is “opened” for development far beyond factory footprints—thus offering a nuanced, place-based account that adds empirical richness to the scholarly literature. This inquiry comes at a critical time as semiconductor fabrication is reshored in the US and environmental justice questions are raised about uncritical support of this industry and green technologies in general at their sites of production.