Farm-to-market road

These are better-quality roads, usually a highway, that farmers and ranchers use to transport products to market towns or distribution centers.

Historically used throughout the country, today the term is primarily associated with a large state-maintained highway system in Texas.

By 1930, counties and townships across the U.S. had built a large number of farm-to-market roads, many of which were in need of repairs and safety improvements.

The Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, Thomas Harris MacDonald, considered this need to be driven not by insufficient funding but by inefficient planning and inadequate equipment on the part of thousands of counties.

[1] This term is most closely associated with Texas, where Farm to Market Road and Ranch to Market Road indicate roadways that are part of the state's system of secondary and connecting routes, built and maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).

The system consists primarily of two-lane roads, although some segments have an additional number of lanes, while some have been upgraded to freeways.

[5] The first officially designated highway, FM 1, was authorized in Sabine County, Texas in 1941 to connect US 96 near Pineland to a sawmill belonging to the Temple Lumber Company at Magasco.

[8] In 1945, the highway commission authorized a three-year pilot program for the construction of 7,205 miles (11,595 km) of farm-to-market roadways, with cost to be shared equally by the state and federal governments.

[9] As the program grew, efforts were made by legislators from rural areas, including State Senator Grady Hazlewood of Amarillo, to expand the farm-to-market road network in the late 1940s.

Although polls suggested that a majority of Texas residents were in favor of such a tax,[11] this measure was stymied by lobbyists, who supported such funding for arterial roads.

[13] This legislation appropriated 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, reserving a flat $15 million per year (equivalent to $152 million in 2023[4]) plus 1 cent (equivalent to $0.13 in 2023[14]) per gallon of gasoline sold in the state for local highway construction.