What jobs and businesses can we build out of local agriculture and VSU and Wiregrass Tech and GMC and SGMC and Moody? Build like the way Silicon Valley grew out of Stanford and HP and Intel, but different, drawing on our local strengths? Various things, no doubt, but the companies the VDT listed in its agricultural heartland article suggest maybe Wiregrass Alley:

When you factor in businesses such as South Georgia Pecan, PCA, the Langdale Company, Shiloh Farms, Dupont, Arizona Chemical, ERCO Worldwide, Coggins Farms, Carter and Sons, and the additional farmers represented by Farmer Browns, the impact of agriculture in Lowndes County alone is one of the largest private, non-governmental industries. Across the region, ag and forestry sustain the economies of a number of counties.

Many of those are obviously agricultural, but Dupont, Arizona Chemical, and ERCO? OK, I’ll buy Arizona Chemical which turns pine products into adhesives and smells. But DuPont? Sure, they make chemical fertilizer, but that’s like listing Chevron as a home heating company.

And what’s this ERCO Worldwide, which provides chemicals like caustic soda for PCA? ERCO Worldwide’s other name hereabouts is Sterling Pulp Chemicals. That’s right, the VDT listed Sterling Chemicals as an agricultural company! Well, that’s hard to deny, because, according to FundingUniverse, Sterling Chemicals “was founded in 1986 to acquire and operate Monsanto Co.’s petrochemical plant in Texas City, Texas.” Nobody can say Monsanto isn’t agricultural, when 90+% of corn, soybeans, cotton, and peanuts grown hereabouts are grown from Monsanto seeds. Which is why we have so many chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides being used around here. Is that really the direction we want to go?

What if we turn the VDT’s list around, and start with the “additional farmers” represented by Farmer Brown and Carters? You know, the ones who sell at Valdosta Farm Days? Farmers markets have increased 6% on average for the past decade. Why is that? Partly because of the conversations and community at a farmers market. Anybody who has gone to Valdosta Farm Days or Hahira Farm Days can attest to that. And it’s not just anecdotal: there is research to demonstrate that in farmers markets compared to supermarkets:

On average, the sociologists found, people were having ten times as many conversations per visit.

Another reason farmers markets are spreading so fast is people are paying attention to the increasing number of scientific reports that “conventional” agriculture is poisoning us, such as the recent one that demonstrates that even the inert ingredients in Roundup are poisonous or the one that links the active ingredient, glyphosate, to Parkinson’s disease. Maybe they’ve heard about Monsanto being sued for “devastating birth defects” and chemical poisoning. And most farmers market customers seem to like fresh local foods that taste good and that support local farmers.

So what if we started with those “additional farmers” that sell at Farmer Brown and Carters and Valdosta Farm Days? They are the ones already starting in a different direction. A direction that is actually more profitable, in addition to healthier (and less flooding and more wildlife). Crop rotation takes more thought and more labor (more jobs!) than just spraying, but it also takes a lot less expense on patented seeds and chemicals, for a net financial profit.

Which could help explain why the USDA says:

Consumer demand for organically produced goods has shown double-digit growth for well over a decade, providing market incentives for U.S. farmers across a broad range of products.

The USDA is talking certified organic, which has so many hoops to jump through that most local producers are not certified, yet many also aren’t using a lot of chemical inputs and are using crop rotation and other organic techniques. Techniques which many old-timers around here will recognize, because they used to use them a half century ago, but with new wrinkles such as computerized records and recent research that may make them even more effective. That’s right: modern organic and local agriculture is a knowledge-based industry.

What has all this got to do with the colleges and SGMC and Moody? Moody could be a big customer for local agricultural produce, as could the local K-12 schools; VSU already is. Wiregrass Tech can (and already is) help teach people how to grow organic or with fewer manufactured inputs. VSU and GMC can study how that’s working out, in conjunction with SGMC, which eventually will have fewer cases of some kinds of diseases to deal with. How many cases, of what kinds of diseases? There’s a field of research we could lead, along with the agricultural industry to cause such improvements in health: healthy jobs from planting to PhDs!

And if we do want other kinds of knowledge-based businesses and workers (which is where Silicon Valley usually gets mentioned), I think we’ll find they like a place that produces local healthy foods.

-jsq

The VDT’s first recent agriculture story started to connect the dots to building on local strengths to growing local knowledge-based jobs in Wiregrass Alley.

“Staff Writer” wrote for the VDT 14 November 2012, Valdosta-Lowndes: An agricultural heartland,

When the Valdosta Daily Times and its sister newspapers in Tifton, Thomasville, Cordele, Americus and Moultrie decided to launch an agriculture magazine in January 2011 to be distributed across South Georgia, it was unknown how it would be received.

Well, the first couple of issues were quarterly, and then due to overwhelming response and requests, it is now a bi-monthly publication going into its third year.

While Valdosta may not consider itself an agriculture community, we sometimes forget just how much acreage and economic benefit derives from the ag and forestry industries locally. With a farmgate value of $70 million and more than two thirds of our entire county taxable digest in agriculture and forestry use, Lowndes County remains dependent on this economic sector almost as much as the surrounding counties, which we consider far more rural than ours.

That’s great, and I congratulate the VDT. Their conclusion is also good as far as it goes, but it could go further:

The VDT continues to congratulate agriculture as a mainstay of the local economy. It’s amazing what a little investigative reporting can turn up! Now if the VDT would connect a few dots of local strengths and suggest how we could take a few tips from Silicon Valley on how to become the Wiregrass Alley of agricultural knowledge-based industry.

The VDT opined Friday, Thumbs up,

THUMBS UP: To the region’s farmers and people involved in the agricultural industry. While some may think agriculture is a thing of South Georgia’s past, a Times story revealed this week that Lowndes County’s farmgate has a $70 million value, making it one of the strongest private-sector industries after South Georgia Medical Center. Given the continued financial clout on the economy, we offer a green thumbs up.

The “some people” would presumably include the Chamber, which made it pretty clear it considers agriculture mostly good for paving over for a shopping mall.

The VDT story mentioned in the Thumbs Up was apparently not Kay Harris’ agriculture alive and well, rather another one of the same day. See next post.

-jsq