Issues – & My Platform

The foundation of my platform are the following issues. These subjects have come up in my discussions with West Virginians across the state, when I’ve asked the question, “What should the priorities of the Commissioner of Agriculture, and the West Virginia Department of Agriculture be?”

Table of Contents

1: ALL farmers, large and small, need our support

An awful turn of phrase: “Get big or get out.”

Earl Butz, the USDA Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford, is supposed to have said this.

He was referring to the size of farm operations. The argument was farmers needed to get bigger, to scale up, and by doing so they would make enough profit to be successful.

Well, it didn’t work. It just destroyed a lot of farmers’ lives and set the food and agricultural system in the U.S. on the destructive path we are on today. The result – what’s called a “cheap food policy” – did make food cheap for consumers for some years, but the problem was, a lot of that cheap food was processed food, which has us now, in the 2020s, facing a lot of hard questions about the sustainability and safety of our food supply, about the healthfulness of it, and about the vulnerabilities faced by our farm community.

Farmers did not benefit from this “cheap food policy” – they didn’t get decent prices for their products. They remained still at the mercy of a now even more globalized market. This was, and is, because farmers for the most part are “price takers” not “price makers”–in other words, they have to accept the prices they are told to pay for inputs (the stuff used to produce a crop or grow an animal) and they have to take whatever price the markets (meat processors or wholesalers, etc.) decide to give them for their products. In short: what it costs to stay in business as a farmer is not reflected in the general public’s perception of what the cost of food should be. (Some thought the solution was to have more farmers get into retail, direct-to-consumer ag business models; that doesn’t always work, but that’s the subject of another column in this issues blog.)

The 1970s and ’80s, as a result of the “get bigger” message (from the same folks who thought “trickle-down economics” would lift people out of poverty) saw tremendous upheavals in American agriculture. Some folks will remember John Mellencamp’s song, “Rain on the Scarecrow “(and its telling line, “Blood on the plow”). This song’s lyrics captured well the tragedies of farm foreclosures.

This is what happens when ag policy is designed to suit huge, corporate farming, not designed to help family farms and all size operations.

Now, West Virginia, with its mountains and thus smaller scale agriculture, did not, and could not, really scale up to the same degree as other places like California and the Midwest did during the 20th century. Some farms did industrialize, did get a bit larger, and some farms were abandoned/turned into housing developments, etc., but for the most part farmers in the Mountain State did not follow that infamous advice of “get big or get out.”

Because of its own set of unique conditions (geography, part-time, off farm income, available family labor) farmers in West Virginia were somewhat able, in the 1970s and ’80s (as well as to some degree in the 1930s, during the Great Depression), to weather some of these difficult times faced by farmers elsewhere in the US.

Yet, the effects of this destructive pattern shaped by wrong-headed policies – operating at times like a tornado type disaster, and at other times like a slow moving iceberg–gonna–hit-the–mother-ship kind of disaster – were nonetheless felt in West Virginia. Over time, we’ve seen the number of farms and farm receipts diminish, and other pressures on farm land and farmers (like housing and industrial developments, lack of availability of family farm labor) have emerged.

The latter kind of pattern is what is operative now. We’re not seeing that iceberg coming to sink our Titanic, perhaps, not all of us, anyway, but it’s coming, nonetheless.

Happily, despite being pretty dysfunctional the past couple of years (due to Republican filibustering) Congress, through the careful shepherding of the Biden-Harris Administration, did get some important legislation passed. And the USDA under Secretary Vilsack, and the Biden Administration’s many helpful executive orders, has also starting to “right the ship.”

And that’s why West Virginia’s agriculture–as I have written on the campaign literature I’ve been sharing since June–abounds with challenges right now, but its potential is bound-less!

Now, there are still a lot of folks in this country who continue to think in short-sighted ways about where their food comes from. Even though we got an early warning of what could happen to our ag and food system during the pandemic, so many in urban areas outside of West Virginia still aren’t really paying full price for their food.

But the West Virginians I’ve been talking to, across the state, they get it. They understand that we need to support our farmers. And they are doing this, by going to farmers markets. But we need to do more. As Commissioner, in my first year of office I’d be embarking on a full policy and regulatory review, to make sure that there’s nothing standing in the way of farmers getting what they need in order to succeed.

So why am I saying that ALL farmers, large and small, deserve our support? They do. But the scale of farming in West Virginia is for the most part quite small. It always has been, because we just don’t have the land base found in the Midwest or California.

2: How do we ensure food safety, and the highest quality feed & seed sources for farmers, as well as ensuring biosecurity on the farm? How do we do all this while streamlining processes and eliminating red tape and unnecessary regulations for farmers?

The key here in West Virginia is that we need a West Virginia Department of Agriculture (WVDA) that is responsive to its citizenry. On the campaign trail I’ve heard numerous stories of farmers waiting for a call back or a response from the WVDA. My plan, once I’m in office, is to meet with all employees, review our mission with them, and embark on a policy and regulatory review to see where things can be simplified and streamlined for farmers who interact with the WVDA.

One other change I would make is to have a “navigator” – a person charged with answering the phone and emails and helping farmers who call in to navigate to the services or tools or information they need. Sometimes this may be directing a farmer to a federal agency, if that is the agency providing that type of service – other times it may be that a farmer is calling to get help that falls outside of the WVDA. The aim here will be to improve the service received by the public from our agency.

There is an additional matter to consider here. WVDA’s budget has been fairly flat over several years–there may be a need for a budget increase (in which case, I’d be meeting with our governor and members of our legislature to make the case for why we need more money). As Commissioner, I’d also be heading to Washington, D.C. to make the case for more funding from our federal counterparts in order to improve the job we are doing of ensuring food safety, ensuring biosecurity, and the like, while making sure that the WVDA operate in coordination and collaboration with numerous other state and federal partners.

3: How do we best protect plant and animal health?

What I’ve been hearing across the state is concern….concern from several quarters. In some cases, people have expressed concern because there do not appear to be the necessary human resources to adequately do the job of protecting plant and animal health (for which the WVDA, and Commissioner, are responsible). In other cases, there appears to be a very heavy hand taken on the part of the WVDA in terms of its regulatory powers and functions, one that is stifling the ability of ag businesses to be profitable. These concerns need to be addressed by, again, a thorough review of WVDA’s policy and regulatory functions, and of staffing allocations/needs moving forward, in the first six months of 2025. All unnecessary, onerous regulations need to be eliminated. But informed decision-making in this task of streamlining is crucial, so that we know how best to protect plant and animal health, and what resources to put to which tasks in that mission of protection.

4: Protecting Farmland….and Facilitating Greater Access to Farmland and Capital

Government can’t do it all. And it shouldn’t. But all levels and branches of government have certain key responsibilities – county, state, and federal. As agriculture is concerned in the first instance with growing food, the state government as well as county governments have roles to play in protecting farmland. Our limited base of arable land in West Virginia needs to be protected. What this means is, whenever industrial projects or large scale housing developments are being contemplated, where these concern large acreages historically used as farmland, there must be consideration of their agricultural purpose, past and future, to determine if there are means by which those lands can remain as farmland. If elected, I would serve on the state’s farmland protection board, and work to assist counties to establish their own farmland protection boards. I would also investigate the mechanisms by which farmers – who often are forced to sell to developers in order to have some kind of retirement nest egg – could be compensated for the ecological goods and services they are providing their communities, so that this support, and support for conservation easements and the like, can ensure that farmers can have dignified retirements while also seeing their farms purchased and farmed successfully by the next generation of farmers.

Where there are large acreages in some counties that are not being utilized and are owned by absentee, out of state landowners, I would work with various stakeholders to see if these lands could be leased or otherwise made available for mountain farming, etc. This would increase the number of opportunities for those who do not have access to land to access it in order to grow food or other agricultural products for sale.

5: 4-H and FFA

It’s exciting to think about the ways that many children and teens, through 4-H and FFA programs, are encountering agriculture and thereby developing a love of the farming lifestyle and the many business models that can accompany farming. Yet, more needs to be done. Some schools in the state do not have vocational ag programs. Some have middle school ag curricula offerings but others do not. If elected, I will work with federal partners, our state’s education officials and our wonderful public-school educators to build on the successes of 4-H and FFA, enhance the ag curricula in this state so that, as some farmers advised, young people are introduced earlier to the science, art, craft and entrepreneurship dimensions of agriculture.

6: Farm to Table, Farm to School, Farm to Everywhere!

Efforts to re-localize agriculture have been somewhat successful, but there’s still a lot more to be done to increase the amount of West Virginia products that West Virginians purchase. Part of this is an access question; part of it is an affordability question. If elected, I am going to organize a “farmers council” made up of two representatives from every county that would meet quarterly to address the policy, regulatory, education/awareness and legislative elements that need to be utilized to bring about more opportunities for West Virginians to support West Virginia farmers.

7. Bringing on the bioeconomy–what does it mean?

See this video for insights into the bioeconomy, in general.)

As Commissioner, I will focus on helping farmers to be more sustainable and profitable, by identifying ways that more of what gets produced is produced sustainably: organic(compostable) packaging for products, more farmer inputs produced within the state as appropriate; products such as hand lotions, soaps, housewares, clothing, textiles, leather goods produced within West Virginia and production scaled up as appropriate; grant funds located from both the federal government and nonprofits to assist in building processing capacity; and within year one a complete regulatory and policy review to identify any “red tape” causing problems for farmers and eliminate it, including new, streamlined processes for development connected to West Virginia’s emerging bioeconomy.