Balancing competing interests (Off The Secretary’s Desk)

(Editor’s note: Douglas Fisher is the New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture)

Usually, whenever one person’s or group’s objectives are brought forth, there is a countervailing opinion (often more than one) or viewpoint that obscures an easy route for agreement.
This is a manifestation of human proclivity that plays out over and over whenever decisions about major, and even sometimes minor, issues, whether public or private, are contemplated, debated, and acted upon.
In the public policy arena, the tug and pull never ends. It ebbs and flows, rises, and falls, and no pact remains intact forever. Opinions and attitudes constantly change, emerge, and evolve. And just when you’re done debating one issue, two or three more related always seem to be waiting in the wings.
In agriculture, for decades if not centuries, however, there arose a common thread dictating that increasing yields and production were, far and away, the most important thing to consider in the that sphere.
This was a charge that governments, businesses, and even consumers drove relentlessly without considering the real costs to society of such an unbridled approach. And this worked!
The standard of living for many across continents and around the globe was raised.
This push, though, has taken its toll on our planet. Practices such as slashing and burning forests to provide cheap, cleared farmland at uncalculated costs have created their own set of problems that now must be addressed.
Often, in the recent past, agriculture’s fixation on yields brought increasing emphasis on chemicals that helped add nutrients to the soil or targeted a plethora of pests.
We periodically hear of “dead zones” such as in the Mississippi Delta, where the water that carries the residue of those chemicals has accumulated to the point of choking out ecosystems.
The focus on yield for yield’s sake also can create an economic boomerang effect, when a given agricultural product is so overproduced in a certain area that prices farmers can receive in the marketplace plummet due to oversupply.
Here we have competing rankings of the interests of people, profit, and planet. And we need to carefully re-evaluate these impacts so as to not tip the balance of nature away from our ultimate survival.
Lately, in our state of New Jersey, farmers are having a difficult time adjusting to market conditions, and a lot of pressures like regulation, the real cost of doing business, and the changing ways consumers get what they need, all mean our farmers must continually re-examine the models of how and what they grow and how they are compensated.
The folks at our Land Grant college, Rutgers, the New Jersey State Board of Agriculture, the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, and New Jersey Farm Bureau are talking about farm viability, endeavoring to address the issue as it was proposed at recent State Agricultural Conventions.
These discussions are coming at a critical time.
It’s been a good 30 years or more since such an in-depth study was conducted and a report put forth that looked at the health of, and prospects for, New Jersey’s agricultural industry. In those days, the conversations mostly centered around the loss of farmland to development.
That issue certainly remains with us, although the crux of it has shifted. In the 1980s and 1990s, developers sought out farmland primarily for housing developments and shopping centers to serve those developments.
Now, the big push to buy up farmland comes from the warehousing industry that seeks to serve the burgeoning Internet-shopping economy, as well as the placement of solar-energy arrays.
Now, though, this ongoing conversation needs to expand and add focus to issues such as resource depletion and climate change and competing public interests that were not contemplated as much in those previous studies.
It is imperative now, though, that these considerations must be factored into the discussions by farmers. It has to be more than people and profit, extended to consider the overall impacts on the planet, too.
Shifts in expectations from consumers have been inching us toward these issues for at least a decade.
The consuming public wants to know how things are grown and raised and what impacts those practices have on our ecosystems.
A long-range plan for agriculture’s future has to include all the technological influences on how farms are operated and how those new tools can maintain yield without further increasing the degradation of precious and dwindling natural resources
Only by evaluating agriculture’s big-picture place in our world, as well as place in keeping farms viable, will we come to a conclusion that will make sense for the industry and for all people well into the next 30 years.