A committee proposed changes Tuesday to one of the guiding goals of a landmark growth plan for rural Collier County.

The changes would reword agriculture preservation policies that are part of the landmark 2002 plan, which applies to some 200,000 acres around Immokalee, and would boost landowner incentives to keep farmland from getting paved.

The plan’s track record on preserving agriculture has been a subject of debate. Agriculture is the first topic to be tackled by the 13-member Rural Lands Stewardship Area review committee, which county commissioners appointed last year to recommend changes to the growth plan. A final report is due this fall.

On Tuesday, committee members proposed dropping the goal of preventing the “premature conversion of agriculture land’’ in favor of a more general goal of protecting agriculture. The exact new wording has yet to be worked out.

The original wording in the 2002 plan is more of a feel-good phrase than a meaningful one, said Tom Jones, Barron Collier Cos. vice president for governmental affairs, a member of the review committee.

“I didn’t know what it meant then and I don’t know what it means now,” Jones said.

As for how to preserve agriculture, committee members talked Tuesday about creating a new system that would put a higher value on farmland and then award development credits to landowners who save it.

Such a system already is in place to reward landowners for preserving environmentally sensitive land, and some farmland has been preserved as a by-product of that system.

So far, landowners have preserved 24,000 acres and more than 30,000 acres are pending for preservation, generating credits to build the new towns of Ave Maria and Big Cypress.

Ave Maria is approved for almost 11,000 homes on some 5,000 acres. Big Cypress is proposed to have almost 9,000 homes on some 3,600 acres.

The plan guides development to farm fields, and county figures show the county’s rural area is losing agricultural acreage.

A January draft report showed almost 94,000 acres of agriculture in 2002 compared to some 85,600 acres in 2007. The loss could not be accounted for by development plans alone.

The county’s final report revised the 2007 agriculture figure to almost 89,400 acres after a closer look at the original estimate.

Agriculture’s fate in Collier County is not sealed, University of Florida agriculture economist Fritz Roka told the committee.

Farming has a good track record of using technology and new products to overcome bad economics and disease, Roka said.

“It’s never a good prediction to bury agriculture,’’ he said.