County Corner: In land of farms and surf, we help agriculture thrive

Four years ago, with my vintage bourbon collection and a beautiful woman in tow, I said goodbye to my native Kentucky and journeyed west to San Luis Obispo County, accompanying my wife as we moved to her family homeland.

As I made the rounds to introduce myself as the new executive director of San Luis Obispo County Farm Bureau, seemingly everyone told me, “You’re headed in the wrong direction—everybody’s leaving California!”

But on the drive out, I had Googled everything I could about agriculture in the county and found much to appreciate. The top commodities are strawberries, winegrapes, avocados, broccoli and cattle. There’s an ag school that’s apparently a big deal at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. And, for some reason, the county agricultural commissioner’s website has a “Nuclear Power Plant Emergency Information for Agriculture” document. Got it.

San Luis Obispo, or SLO, is “where the Wild West meets surfer culture,” according to my wife, Kiah, a sixth-generation SLO County cattle rancher. Its distinct microclimates foster a world-class Paso Robles winegrape industry, high-value avocados and citrus groves along the coast, a vibrant row-crop industry in our southern region adjoining the Santa Maria Valley, and greenhouses and nurseries that lead the nation in many varieties of transplants and planting stock. There is also a proud ranching heritage that boasts the largest county Cattlemen’s Association membership in California.

Herein lies the crux of our story, one not unique to SLO but inherent to the California Farm Bureau’s network of Farm Bureaus representing the state’s 58 counties and to the 2,800 county Farm Bureaus across America. Farm Bureau’s greatest strength is that as we come together, we represent all of agriculture.

A united agricultural community is a force to be reckoned with. Farm Bureau is at its best when we rally farms, ranches and agricultural businesses of all sizes and commodities together around a single call to action.

When we can get winegrape growers to care about row-crop issues, when we convince flower growers to stand with cattle ranchers, when we get tractor dealers and feed stores to champion causes of their customers, we can affect policy change as well as anyone.

We’ve seen it in San Luis Obispo County time and time again. Earlier this year, our Farm Bureau led the charge to combat the first greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration mandate for agriculture in the U.S. As part of a land use ordinance change by the county board of supervisors, farmers in the Paso Robles region were to be subject to a host of mitigation measures as a condition of planting new irrigated crops.

I’m proud our Farm Bureau was able to get our local Grower-Shipper Association and Cattlemen’s Association to stand together with us on a contentious issue that predominately impacted grape growers in just one part of the county.

As with many other California counties, Groundwater Sustainability Plans are going to challenge our SLO County Farm Bureau for decades to come. If we stand alone as individual commodities, if we allow our industry to be divided into camps of bigger producers versus smaller producers, all of agriculture will lose.

The dichotomy between two of our local groundwater basins illustrates this point. In one basin, it’s been neighbor against neighbor, grower against grower, and in such an environment, politicians and partisans smell an opportunity to stoke rhetoric instead of find solutions. After all, solutions are painful and complicated, and sadly, they don’t garner many votes.

In a basin that has been extensively studied and classified as critically overdrafted by the California Department of Water Resources, we have county supervisors publicly stating they don’t believe the basin is actually in overdraft. Contrast that with another local basin—it brought farmers, residents and elected officials together with acknowledgment of the problem, mutual concessions and a real dialogue about the path forward.

Which one do you think will get their basin in balance sooner?

We cannot afford to keep our heads down and ignore issues outside our commodity or community. In an era of specialization in agriculture, with fewer diversified farms, too many in our industry just belong to their commodity organization if anything at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I spent many years working for one and they’re important. I can tell you that each of my members expects me to be well versed in the nuanced policy issues of their particular commodity, and it’s hard. Having multiple commodities represented locally on our board of directors and at the state level helps Farm Bureau stay connected to all aspects of agriculture.

I may not always be as up to speed on a commodity-specific issue as their association staff is, but I know how we can align our advocacy efforts and put the combined industry-wide strength of Farm Bureau behind it.

We sometimes can excel at finding every way we disagree without realizing how much more we agree. Remember, even in rural counties such as San Luis Obispo, we’re outnumbered by people who do not rely on farming and ranching for their livelihood. Be it at the ballot box, the halls of Sacramento and Washington, regional water board hearings or county supervisor chambers, there’s strength in numbers.

The stakes are too high for agriculture to not come together. As goes the state motto of my old Kentucky home, “United we stand, divided we fall.”