A visit from the Commissioner of Agriculture
By Jana E. Pye, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Hugh Weathers is a familiar face to the farmers in Darlington County, both as a fellow farmer and as the Commissioner for the South Carolina Department of Agriculture.
In a recent visit to the News and Press, Weathers shared the success of agribusiness in our state, and the goals for the future.
“Back in 2009 we created a goal for ourselves to increase agribusiness in the state to $50 billion by the year 2020,” said Weathers. “We came up with that goal after reports from economists said we were doing about $34 billion dollars flowing through South Carolina’s economy at that time.”
According to Weathers, those figures included everything from growing crops to forestry, jobs, and production companies that process crops.
“Last fall, we decided to see where we were,” he continued. “Both in terms of economic impact, and how many jobs we had created.”
The numbers were generated by a report from Dr. James London, of London & Associates, a retired Clemson University professor, revealed a $41.7 billion total, up 23% since 2006. Jobs increased from 109,141 to 212,530 – which is 10.5% of the state’s workforce.
In an area such as Darlington County, the effects may be seen in the success of the Rogers Brothers Gillespie’s Peanuts, the reopening of the livestock auction under new owners Low Country Live Stock Exchange, the new Birdsong Corporation large peanut facility, and Carolina Rice Plantation. [See story: Darlington County celebrates the history and future of rice]
“If you didn’t have anybody growing anything, we’d spend the same,” continued Weathers. “The only difference is the money would go somewhere else. It’s in our economy. If we can attract businesses to agriculture, with more farmers, more markets, we can reach our goal of $50 billion by the year 2020. We have gotten very close- and in the time that we had the worst recession in 50 years. So while the general economy is teetering along, agribusiness enjoyed a nice five year stretch.”
Marketing efforts to entice buyers to purchase Certified SC Grown have been successful, as are the “buy local” efforts from entities across the state.
“We don’t have a BMW or a Boeing come along for agriculture,” said Weathers. “We have smaller ones- but all these things add up. The potential is still there. It requires us to focus on growing this as part of the economy.”
Weathers continued; “It’s nothing complicated, but we are all going to spend dollars on food – we want the dollars to stay here. When you buy bananas, the money goes to Ecuador or Chile; when you buy oranges, they from Florida. But when you buy peaches and tomatoes and watermelons and zucchinis … we need those dollars to come put to South Carolina farmers. We can show you a South Carolina product is just as good – and better. Local food economy has shown tremendous progress because within all these numbers some of the ones that point to local foods – fruit and vegetables. They don’t move around like cotton. Fruit and vegetables have had a 50% increase in value for South Carolina farmers meaning that the markets are expanding for our farmers.”
“Obviously, many do go out of state, we can’t sell all of our peaches in state -but we are doing a better job with the local food economy.”
Weatherford stresses that this can go beyond the family dinner table to local restaurants, hospital food services, school food services, and factories that produce food products.
“We encourage people to support the neighboring farmers, the economic benefit is there.”
The asset of the port in Charleston is another boon to the agribusiness in the state, with the port enjoying a 150% increase of agriculture products since 2000.
Exporting Certified SC Grown agricultural products to Europe is another potential; Weathers recently attended a conference in London and learned how the international markets may be yet another significant economic boon to the state.
Crops of note and future agribusiness trends include:
• Tobacco: many farms, including those in the Pee Dee, are shipping tobacco internationally.
• Cotton: a new mill will be coming to Lancaster that plans to process cotton into thread to send to China to make textiles, rather than shipping raw cotton.
• Blueberries: they have seen a tremendous growth potential, on par with strawberries.
• Peaches: continue to be a tremendously successful crop, out producing Georgia by 2 ½ times the volume of shipping per year.
• Frozen poultry: this fast growing export is going around the world – some organic.
• Vineyards: still not as profitable as North Carolina, but has received some success.
• Bio mass: tremendous growth in producing energy . “The wood biomass market will help especially when the traditional wood product market of housing recovers, that makes more -that is another platform where we’ll see growth.”
• AgriTourism: A smaller but tremendous growth potential, the idea of marketing farms as destinations for visitors to experience farming.
• Organic produce: “SC has seen a pretty good growth rate- now about 6% of the market.”
• Incubator Farm Projects: One successful farm incubator program in Charleston County, called Dirt Works.
• Food Hub: A plan for a food hub in Marion County, where several farmers can use processing equipment cooperatively. “There is already a successful food hub in Charleston, ‘Grow Food Carolina’ that took a lot of perseverance to create.”
Challenges:
Weathers states that the challenges to reach the goals set by the Department of Agriculture are the regulations set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), particularly the Waters of the US (WOTUS) which he says farmers refer to as, “woe to us.”
“I would say regulatory overreach, and how that will impact resources like agriculture – we are not quite sure.”
“The regulatory environment is something that collectively puts pressure on agriculture and our elected officials have got to work together. We have to keep in mind that only 1 – 2 % of people are farmers 98, 99 % are just neighbors so you have to be cognizant of your neighbors preference so that creates a balancing act you need to do.”
“Part of our message is having farms be good stewards of their land, their livestock, so that when the consuming public were to look at, for example, only Weathers Farms as an example of agriculture they would be pleased and confident in buying South Carolina- and if they looked bad, they would think they were all bad. If we all take a lot of pride in what we do I feel good about the conclusion they will make.”
Another challenge is getting young people interested in farming. “The average age of the SC farmer is 59,” said Weathers. “We will continue to work with Clemson University to encourage young people to choose agribusiness as a career path, and work with other agencies across the state.”
Read more at: agriculture.sc.gov.