Driving down Poplar towards I-269, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a small plot of produce being grown adjacent from a home. I immediately began romanticizing the idea that even after all its growth, Collierville still holds on to its roots, pun intended. I jumped on 269, connecting to 385, before hopping off on the South Houston Levee Rd exit, when I noticed once again this undeveloped farmland to my left. This got my wheels turning: “What is growing in Collierville? Are we still a farm town after the last decade of stupendous economic growth?” So, I eventually drove my car over to the Town of Collierville’s Long Range Planning committee chair and TN State Representative, Kevin Vaughan’s office, to dig up some dirt on how much undeveloped land there is in Town, and to see what we plan on doing with it.

“Collierville is extraordinarily well planned, and very aggressively managed to ensure positive growth in our future.” – Kevin Vaughan

I quickly learned that there is approximately 1200 acres of undeveloped land in Collierville to date, and while many of the zoned five acre plots you can see in the Town maps are approved for future developmental use, for the time being, farmers are using that land to yield crops such as soybeans, milo and corn in the Town limits. These farmers are being protected from high property taxes through an initiative called the Greenbelt Law program, encouraging good stewardship of the land, preventing the upheaval of family farms. “The families that have owned these properties for decades have been tremendous stewards of it [the land],” remarks Vaughan. “They held onto it to make sure that the Town was growing in the way that they wanted, so that their property would increase in value, but also the overall community would be a place that would thrive. That’s been something that a lot of times is overlooked, that the visionaries of the past and the leadership of the past did a very good job of building their vision right. And it wasn’t just the Town elected officials, it was the citizenry of the Town that bought into it and utilized their rights to protect the Town.”

Several decades prior, Collierville was known as a farm town where residents and newcomers could come together and collect weekly produce on the Town Square. While today there is fewer acreage of farmable land, farming still has a role to play in the Town of Collierville. “Farming has a continued role in the development of the Town. These agricultural tools [maps and Greenbelt program] allow for orderly future developments to benefit Collierville. Collierville is extraordinarily well planned, and very aggressively managed to ensure positive growth in our future.”

By: Anna Bell