Travelling Farm to Market
March and April have several annual events that are dear to people’s hearts. Sports people are wearing their fan gear and glued to their TVS for March madness games. Sweetwater residents are ankle deep in their Rattlesnake Roundup. Easter eggs and church celebrations are heralding in Springtime. And, of course, there is the ritual dear to the hearts of a great many students called “Spring Break”. Some may ask what spring break has to do with agriculture, but it brought to my mind the fact that so many “hit the road” to travel to various points of destination and much of that time is spent driving Farm to Market roads.
The first Farm to Market road in Texas was completed in 1937 during the Great Depression. It connected Mount Enterprise and the former community of Shiloh in Rusk County. This route was 5.8 mile long and is now part of Texas State Highway 315, but it was obvious even at that earlier time the necessity of good ground transportation paths for farmers and ranchers to get their products to the buyers. The first officially designated highway, FM 1 (Farm to Market abbreviated to FM), was authorized in San Augustine county in 1941 to connect US96 near Pineland to a sawmill belonging to the Temple Lumber Company at Magasco. The idea for having paved roads in the rural areas to help transport the agricultural products was enough to begin a campaign in Texas with the slogan “Get the farmer out of the mud”. In 1949, the Colson-briscoe Act (sponsored by Senator E. N. Colson and State Representative Dolph Briscoe, who became governor in 1972), established funding for the creation of an extensive system of secondary roads to provide access to the rural areas of the state and to allow farmers and ranchers to bring their goods to market. It reserved $15 million per year (now well over $200 million) plus 1 cent per gallon of gasoline sold in the state for the highway construction. The system now accounts for over half the mileage in the Texas Department of Transportation system and is the largest secondary highway system in the United States.
Farm to Market roads are paved, usually twolane roads (one lane in each direction), maintained by the state, and have varying speed limits. Signs designating a Farm to Market (FM) or a Ranch to Market (RM) are a black square background with the white shape of Texas. The words “FARM ROAD” or “RANCH ROAD” appear in white text on the background with the route number in black within the shape of Texas. No two FMS or RMS are the same with a total of 3,550 routes designated. The cities of Texas now host many of these FMS (like our own FM 700 in Big Spring), with FM1093 in front of the Galleria in the Westheimer area of Houston as the busiest.
Though the Texas system of Farm to Markets is unique to the state, several other states employ a similar system. For example, Louisiana designates their FMS as C routes, Iowa has county governments in charge of FM maintenance, and state of Kansas has a sunflower motive on their road signage. Differences aside concerning our farm to market roads, our fifty states are linked with a paved “yellow brick road” leading us home called the interstate.
Just as the necessity of getting our agricultural goods to market helped to create the farm to market roads, President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the need of a national highway system to provide for the needs of an ever increasing modern and mobile nation. On June 29, 1956, the Federal-aid Highway Act was passed. Funded with an initial $26 billion dollars it also derived money from a gasoline tax. The new interstate highway was designed as a “controlled-access expressway with no at grade crossings-that is, they had overpasses and underpasses instead of intersections. They were to be at least four lanes wide and designed for high-speed driving. They were intended to serve several purposes: eliminate traffic congestion, replace poorly kept roads to improved highway safety, make coast to coast transportation more efficient and make it easy to get out of big cities in case of an atomic attack”. Fortunately for our nation, we have never had to make use of the evacuation routes for a nuclear attack, but the interstate has helped to save countless lives during natural disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, and tsunamis. Although the interstate was built for civilian use the thought of defense needs did play a part in the initial design of the project. The Department of Defense had indicated that a 14foot clearance on overpasses would be sufficient for most military vehicles however, they realized after the Sputnik launch in 1957, a 17foot clearance would be needed for some larger equipment. There was a compromise in 1960 to a 16-foot clearance in rural areas. With the continuing hits to our overpasses on I-20, most of us would like to see a 20-foot clearance! The numbering system of the Interstate (those ending in 0 are transcontinental and Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico have A, H and PR designations) is different from the Texas Farm to Market but Texas had an influence on the Interstate signage. The design submitted by Texas for the Interstate marker was chosen over all the others. No matter what signs we follow on our travels, be it on the Interstate that is celebrating just over 65 years in the making or the essential Farm to Market roads, every citizen has been touched with the paved roads set before us. Please take care of yourselves on these roads and remember to respect the ag producers who travel with us.