No one is sharpening an ax to cut down thousands of acres of lush, green pecan groves that color the landscape along the Santa Cruz River in Sahuarita.
Last Monday night, however, the Sahuarita Planning and Zoning Commission approved plans to transform the pecan farm into a master-planned community with 1,900 acres set aside for homes, 1,100 acres for businesses and another 2,400 acres for planned mixed-use projects.
The local family that owns Farmers Investment Co. believes it could easily be a decade before a single tree falls to make way for new projects, but even then the company owns thousands of undeveloped acres in the community that are not part of day-to-day operations.
Those properties could be sold off first, depending on the project.
Dick Walden, whose father, Keith, founded the company in 1937, said the plans are designed to help the family manage the long-term development of the 7,000 acres of land he owns stretching 14 miles from Pima Mine Road to Continental Road.
“First of all, we don’t think anything is going to happen for 10 years,” Walden said Friday. “It is going to be a very long evolutionary process, depending on the market.”
He said there have been constant requests to sell or donate land since 2002, although he acknowledges that the number of calls dropped during the Great Recession.
The family has largely resisted calls to sell off pieces of the land, but those requests are not solely coming from private developers, said his wife and FICO vice president, Nan Walden.
Nearby schools, churches, parks and trails are some of the examples of requests either to sell off or donate their land, she said.
The family has a long history of donating land to the community, including when his father closed a cattle feedlot to allow for the construction of La Posada at Park Centre retirement community. More recently, the family donated land to the Sahuarita Unified School District.
Sitting in a small room eating candied pecans a block away from the main processing plant for the entire operation — the company has another pecan farm in the San Simon area near the New Mexico border — Nan Walden said the business is currently doing great.
But even as the third generation of the Walden family is working in the company, she said it is hard to predict if future generations will want to continue harvesting and selling pecans.
A long-term plan, she said, will help future generations use the land wisely.
“We’ve seen too many farming families not plan, and then land is piecemeal because of estate taxes, cash-flow needs or because two or three generations down the road are not involved like ours are,” she said. “We just thought it was the prudent thing to do.”
There are no mortgages on the property pushing the family toward development, she said. But there are other pressures, such as movements to preserve the Santa Cruz River corridor and an extension of the Anza Trail, which cut through the family-owned property.
The family wants to be at ground level of those discussions.
“It became a necessity given the amount of land we have in this valley,” she said.
Monday night’s discussion is one of the last opportunities for the public to weigh in on the proposal before a formal vote by the Sahuarita Town Council, currently planned for either March or April.
Sarah More, the town’s planning and building director, said the Town Council will review the Sahuarita Farms proposal later this month, but a formal vote is still at least a month away. The current proposal, however, is just the start of the zoning process for the proposed development.
FICO officials estimate it will take several years before the project can receive all the regulatory approvals necessary before building permits could be issued.
