LANSING – Both food growing and processing is expanding in the state, and the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development will be working in the next year to ensure that trend continues, Director Jamie Clover Adams told Gongwer News Service in a recent interview.
The agency will also be working to ensure the food is safe, she said.
Agricultural production is now worth $100 billion annually to the state’s economy, Clover Adams said.
“It’s not all just high corn or soybean prices,” she said. “There’s a lot of growth in processing.”
Some of that also was meeting the goal of doubling export values, she said. Though official numbers were not reported, Clover Adams said she expected they would show the state reaching $3.5 billion.
The state also added 58 new livestock facilities, meaning some $108 million in new construction, she said.
The overall value of agriculture is up from $60 billion about 10 years ago, she said.
That growth, she said, is driving one of the key efforts in the coming year: workforce development.
“The Baby Boomers are starting to retire and we’ll have to replace them, and then you add on top of that the sector’s growing like gangbusters,” she said. “So how do we get people interested in working in agriculture?”
That effort, she said, has to go beyond merely attracting new workers, but showing them a career path through the industry.
“In a lot of ways that’s an important thing to do is help people connect the dots in a place that they’re not familiar with,” she said. “If we can do that, then we’ll get people interested.”
The department is working with Michigan Works! in the Thumb region to develop some of those career links.
Once the food is ready to sell, the department also has to be sure it is safe, Clover Adams said. So the department will continue working with the industry and the Legislature to increase some of its inspection fees.
“Our compliance rate is only 55 percent,” she said. “How do we get that number up?”
One way, she said, is to increase the number of inspectors to ensure regular inspections. “Our presence in the field serves as deterrence,” she said.
The department is also working to make the inspection process easier by moving to a central system. Clover Adams noted that dairy inspections are still recorded on paper.
“We’re going to launch them into the electronic age in January,” she said, though that will not yet be part of the central system.
Nursery, food and motor fuel quality licenses will launch on the central licensing system in the coming year, with the remainder of the 40 licenses added in coming years, making life better for the customer and the inspector, she said.
The new system provides portals for the public to view the results of the inspections.
The department will also continue with its efforts to reduce the environmental impact of farming through the Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program, she said. At the end of October, the program crossed the halfway mark to its goal of 5,000 verified farms despite some criticism the department could make the goal.
“I think we’re getting to some critical mass where we’re going to get to that number,” she said, noting that an increasing number of farms have joined the program each year.
But she said the effects are more important than the number of farms. “It’s all the environmental benefits that go with it and the risks that are reduced on farms,” she said. “Annually, 780 million pounds of sediment, 572,000 pounds of phosphorus and 1.2 million pounds of nitrogen didn’t go in the water because of the practices. Those are year over year benefits you get.”
And she said getting current farmers to adopt the practices will mean those changes being passed down to future generations.
In addition to farms adopting recommendations under MAEAP, the state has also reached 75,000 acres of buffer strips between farms and neighboring water bodies under the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. That, she said, prevented another 1 million tons of sediment from 375,000 acres.
Continuing the MAEAP program will mean, though, renewing the Groundwater Freshwater Fund, which sunsets this year, Clover Adams said. The program provides about $4.5 million that in part funds MAEAP reviews.
The department will also be working to better tell its story in the coming year, Clover Adams said. Instead of leaders for each program or division simply reporting what they did in the past year, she said she and her communications staff are working to encourage them to include why those activities are important.
“We’re going to help our staff start packaging what they do. We do a lot of really good things. … There are really good stories out there,” she said. “If they can’t tell me why it’s important, then it’s not something that adds value and we probably shouldn’t be doing it.”
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