On the table: agriculture race more important than ever
Sarah Taber (left), Steve Troxler (right)
North Carolina’s commissioner of agriculture is responsible for leading an agency that plays a vital role in one of the state’s most important economic sectors. With a record-setting $111 billion impact in 2023, the Tarheel state leads the nation in the production of eggs, poultry, sweet potatoes and tobacco and ranks second in Christmas trees, trout and turkey.
The next commissioner of agriculture will deal with a mix of issues related to food supply security — some old and some new.
Traditional concerns about foreign labor remain of interest, alongside new challenges centering around legalized cannabis and the loss of farmland to development.
Wide-ranging tariffs, proposed by former President Donald Trump if he wins, are a recent wildcard, but for five-term Republican incumbent Steve Troxler and his opponent, agricultural consultant and Democrat Sarah Taber, that issue — and more — are all on the table.
Food supply security, the United Nations says, is national security. It’s not something people in the United States often have to think about, but it’s not something Americans want to think about after it’s too late.
Integral to American food supply security is the labor force, especially foreign workers. The Department of Agriculture doesn’t play a role — the state’s Department of Labor and seasonal H2A federal visa programs form the guardrails — but much of what the state’s larger farmers and processors do is dependent on migrant labor.
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“The problem is, every time we try to do something to make the labor force more efficient, it gets tangled up in the bigger immigration debate, and people don’t want to touch it,” said Troxler, who added that he’d been working on H2A reforms for the better part of 30 years, without success. “So we are we are on a crossroads with labor, and we either are going to have a reliable, affordable labor force in agriculture, one or two things are going to happen — we’re going to price a lot of people out of the ability to buy product, or there will be no product.”
Taber, a Fayetteville resident who was born into a military family and holds a DPM (doctor of plant medicine) degree from the University of Florida, says the commissioner’s main job regarding labor is training famers who want to hire H2A workers and educating them on how to responsibly abide by the terms of the visas. But we’d need less of them, Taber said, if farmers diversified their offerings to turn seasonal jobs into more permanent jobs, say 10 months a year, that American workers would consider taking.
“Most of our hand-harvested crops in the whole state of North Carolina all getting harvested around the same time,” said Taber. “We could grow more blueberries, peaches. We can grow a lot of things that are harvested in different times.”
It’s not often that farmers gain access to a new crop, something they haven’t been able to grow (legally) before, but some North Carolinians — the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, specifically — are now cultivating and selling recreational and medical cannabis. That endeavor will be closely watched by the rest of the state, where cannabis remains illegal. Moral and public safety arguments aside, the tax receipts from other states are substantial.
“I think it’s another important opportunity that we need to stop closing ourselves off to,” Taber said, opining the crop could be worth $800 million in tax revenue. “I feel like a lot of folks say when we’re legalizing cannabis, ‘We’re creating a new industry.’ We’re not. We’re bringing transparency, visibility, accountability and taxation to a big business that already exists in our state.”
Troxler isn’t as enthusiastic, especially for the people he deals with on a regular basis.
“I don’t see it being a big deal for farmers. The reason being, if it’s going to be controlled at all, the government is probably going to put it in the hands of very few people. That is the proposal that had come out of our legislature,” he said, pointing out that North Carolina is already the fourth-most diverse agricultural producer in the country and that 10 of the 21 main agricultural products produced in the state are in the top ten, nationally.
It will be difficult to retain those rankings if prime agricultural land continues to end up beneath concrete pads with houses on top. Back in April, Haywood County farmers sounded the alarm on disappearing acreage locally, as well as across the state; the American Farmland Trust released a study last year, calling North Carolina the second most at-risk state for loss of farmland between now and 2040.
“We’ve lost a lot of farmland,” said Don Smart, president of the Haywood County Farm Bureau, at the April meeting. “This county 40 years ago had nearly 80,000 acres of farmland. We’re down to less than 50,000.”
Troxler says the loss of farmland and forests is “the number one issue that we face in the future of North Carolina,” and that he’d advocated for farmland preservation measures from the General Assembly in the past.
“Last year, we had 112 applications for permanent easements, which would have been a $55 million expenditure,” he said. “We’ve only had $18 million to use, so it’s got to become a priority with the legislature and local leaders.”
Taber thinks if North Carolina’s farms were more profitable, developers would have fewer tracts available for development.
“It is not population growth that’s causing our farmland to go under. That’s what happens to farmland after farms go out of business. When farms go out of business, it’s that they’re not making as much money as they should be,” she said. “Farmers here in North Carolina are often making as little as half as much per acre as their peers in Georgia and Virginia. That’s us not putting our land to work effectively.”
Former President Donald Trump could hobble North Carolina’s farmers even more than development — his wide-ranging tariff proposal would amount to a 20% tax on American consumers and likely prompt retaliatory tariffs by trading partners.
North Carolina famers are already losing out, to the tune of $6,000 per year, as a result of Trump backing out of the Trans-pacific Partnership.
“Trump’s not even in office anymore,” Taber said. “He made such a bad deal that it cannot be recovered from.”
Even Troxler thinks Trump’s tariff proposal is a bad idea.
“We have the most efficient system for the production of agricultural products anywhere in the world, but tariffs do get in the way, and we went through the trade war and retaliation with China, and that is not beneficial to us. There’s no question,” he said. “But the question becomes, how do you get fair trade? A lot of our products going into these other countries are hit with very high tariff rates to be protected, and so you got to negotiate to the point that is fair on both sides. And in many cases, we’re being slapped with these tariffs, and it kills us.”
