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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Brunell: Policies should be fair to state agriculture

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Some say spring is the most wonderful time of the year in Washington, when apple trees blossom, tulips bloom and colorful lentils carpet the fields on the Palouse.

While the spring colors are eye-catching, it is in fall when our state reaps the benefits of our bountiful harvest.

The Washington Policy Center recently published a report detailing agriculture’s value to our economy. It is a joint effort with the Washington Farm Bureau to bolster support for farmers, ranchers and food processors.

It is hard to succinctly summarize agriculture’s significance to Washington. Farms account for 13 percent of our state’s GDP and employ more people than Microsoft and Boeing. There are 160,000 jobs in the state tied to agriculture.

Agriculture accounts for $51 billion in yearly Washington economic activity. In 2014, aerospace contributed $69.5 billion, of which Boeing’s share was $55.4 billion, according to the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

Our state is blessed with rich soils, abundant fresh water, low cost hydropower, a favorable climate and hard-working people. Washington farmland grows more than 300 varieties of crops, second only to California in crop diversity.

Our farming supports more than 200 food processors.

The Washington Potato Commission reported that 99 percent of potato farms are family businesses whose owners have deep roots in their communities.

The fastest growth sector is wine production. The number of wineries has tripled over the last decade. Washington now has 860 wineries which bottled nearly 15 million cases of wine each year.

Much of our farm production is shipped overseas. In 2014, our state exported $16 billion in food mostly to Asian countries. Interestingly, about half of the products were grown or raised here while others, particularly wheat, pass through our seaports.

That was a problem last year. The shutdown of 29 West Coast seaports over a labor dispute hit farmers hard. Washington’s apple growers alone lost $100 million, and fresh fruits and vegetables literally rotted on docks.

Although traffic congestion was not referenced in the report, it is a big problem for farmers. Some crops, such as cherries, must be quickly trucked from Central Washington orchards to ports for immediate shipments abroad.

Trucks move an estimated $42 million of freight on roadways in Washington every hour, yet many of them idle in traffic. The American Transportation Research Institute estimated traffic bottlenecks cost truckers $49.6 billion in 2014.

While our state has a prosperous agriculture sector, the Washington Policy Center believes farm families feel the pressure of harmful legislation and regulations.

In 2013, the agriculture community faced nearly a billion dollars tax increases from legislation introduced in Olympia. That would be on top of the estimated $230 million farmers and agriculture-related businesses pay in property taxes annually.

Finally, farmers will feel the cost impacts of the governor’s proposed greenhouse gas rules that hit fertilizer makers and food processing facilities hard.

The report’s bottom line is that agriculture must be given equal priority with high-tech, software, aerospace and biomedical research when our leaders set tax, regulatory and economic policy.

Apology

Note on my April 19 column, “Obama’s regulations will hurt America:” I drew heavily from The Wall Street Journal without proper attribution. Although I referenced and quoted Wall Street Journal reporter Nick Timiraos in one section of the column, other parts of the column were drawn from Timiraos as well. They should have been attributed to him but were not. I apologize to my readers, Nick Timiraos and The Wall Street Journal.

Don Brunell, retired as president of the Association of Washington Business, is a business analyst, writer, and columnist. He lives in Vancouver and can be contacted at TheBrunells@msn.com.

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