[upbeat music] - And joining us now is the Democratic candidate for Commissioner of Agriculture, Dr. Sarah Taber.

Dr. Taber, thanks for coming onto State Lines to explain why now is the right time to run for Commissioner of Agriculture.

That'll be your first question, why now?

- Of course, well thank you for having me, first off.

And why now?

We've had the same person in this office for 20 years and North Carolina is now leading the country in farmland loss.

That's been blamed on a lot of things, but what I see, because I've worked with farmers on their business for a long time, what I see is the farmers here can make as little as half as much as their peers in Virginia, in Georgia.

So, that tells you we got a problem, and it's not weather, it's not soil, it's not agribusiness, 'cause those are pretty similar in those places.

There's something here in our state and I put that up to leadership.

We have folks who don't know what their options are, aren't able to build their businesses effectively, and that's causing us some real problems.

It is time for a change in leadership.

- Tell us about your background, what expertise would you bring to the office of Commissioner of Agriculture?

- Sure.

So, I've worked in agriculture for 27 years, and worked my way up from manual labor in the fields and just worked on up from there.

I was able to work my way through crop school, I was very fortunate to do that.

And with that combination of that hands-on experience for years, and that scientific training, I was able to start working with farmers one-on-one, again, to help them with their business model.

Farmers are already working hard, we want to make sure that that hard work is paying the bills, right?

So we have to build a business, growing things that are gonna make more money, and sometimes if a crop makes more money, it is trickier to grow.

So you need a little bit of help to make sure that when you make that change as a farm, you stick that landing, and you're able to really make that money and make that revenue work for you.

- How are farms changing without turning over the farmland over to development?

- Sure.

Again, different crops make different amounts of money, and so the number one change that we want to do in order to make sure that farmers can stay in business, is grow those things and make more money.

And again, they're trickier, they're more complicated.

Right now, we grow a lot of corn, soy, cotton, tobacco, those crops really made sense for us financially to grow 20 or 30 years ago.

But so many things have changed since then, and we need to help farmers keep up, so.

- I've noticed on your website, you're a big proponent of increasing the fruit and vegetables, and also growing, I guess trees for nuts, and doing nut butters and things of that nature.

Explain that process, because the industry is continually growing, even as farmland is shrinking, someone's being more efficient.

But you say we can go into different crops, what are we not growing we ought to be growing?

- Sure, so first off, I want to address the idea that the North Carolina farm economy is growing.

We get numbers, I think the current one is $111 billion worth of farm production.

That's not true.

Our farm production is actually more in the neighborhood of $20 billion, so how do we get to $111 out of that number?

We're counting a lot of things that aren't actually agriculture.

One of them, my favorite is retail.

We're counting every piece of food and clothing sold in the State of North Carolina, as part of our farm economy, even if it wasn't grown or made here.

So, we're counting urban retail sales as part of our farm economy.

And so, we actually have a big mismatch, between the numbers tell us we're doing really well, because our urban economy's growing, and what's actually happening in our farm sector is not that.

When actually, I'm talking before North Carolinians, I will ask people, according to those numbers, according to that $111 billion, if that's true, than our farm sector has doubled in size in the last 20 years.

So I always ask people, raise your hand if it feels like your local economy, that the farm economy has doubled in size in the last 20 years.

No one has raised their hand yet.

A lot of people laugh.

They know that's not right.

It's only folks who are kind of disconnected from agriculture, they're getting fooled by those numbers, and I think that's a real problem with our leadership if they have to mislead in order to look like they're doing a good job.

So, we are actually having a lot of missed opportunities here in our farm economy, that's part of the problem I'm addressing with getting into crops that make more money.

North Carolina's a really special place where you can grow almost anything, and that includes crops that make a lot more money.

- I remember.

- Sure, yeah.

- Farmers starting growing the cannabis for the CBD oil, I think that market's kinda come and gone, or it's very well saturated.

What else is out there that's, there's nothing, not an easy buck out there, but a more lucrative effort for the amount of time you're gonna spend farming.

- Right, so I tell people, corn and soy, they're gonna make you about $400, maybe $800 an acre.

That's down here.

Something like tobacco is gonna make you $3,000 to $4,000 an acre, so almost a 10x difference.

So you can see why people get really excited about farming tobacco, why it's such a big thing here in North Carolina.

But did you know, strawberries and tomatoes, which are not an exotic crop, they're just a normal fruit and veggie, they can make you $40,000 an acre gross.

So, you still have to pay your bills out of that, but you get a lot more money to start with.

That's by the way, 4-0 thousand, not one four thousand, that's 4-0 thousand dollars breaker.

So that's quite a bit more than corn and soy and tobacco.

So, that's not getting into anything exotic, that's just plain old strawberries and tomatoes.

A lot of fruits and veggies are just gonna make a lot more money per acre.

So things like leafy greens, again, strawberries, tomatoes, any kind of berries, melons, blueberries, a lot of those things just make way more money.

And we have urban markets in the Northeast that have almost a bottomless demand for food.

Right now, they're getting that from California.

But California's running out of land and water.

North Carolina, because we're a special place where you can grow almost anything, a lot of what we're growing in California for fruits and veggies right now, would transfer quite well to out here.

Hazelnuts is another example, pecans can do a lot of the things that we're using almonds for right now, so we can do that and save water compared to California having to irrigate them quite a bit.

So, there's a lot to be gained, both for the west coast in saving water by transferring some of those crops here.

And also, it's a huge business win for us here in North Carolina, because again, those crops make so much more money than what we're currently growing.

- How much influence do you think you could have as Agricultural Commissioner, or how would you gain the influence with farmers to walk away from crops that may not pay as much, but are stable and reliable family raisers?

How do you do that using a government position when this is strictly for the most part, a zoning and a private sector concern?

- Sure.

I think that's why it's so important to have someone with really good private sector business development experience in this job.

The Commissioner of Agriculture is there to bridge the gap between policy and economics, right?

You need someone who understands business development.

That starts with farmers knowing what their options are.

So again, I've worked with farmers for a long time, saying here's what you could be growing, here's what it would cost you to do it, is this a good fit for you?

You have to have an administration that's focused on that, that's focused on the financial side of agriculture.

Not just hey, somebody wants a lot of corn, someone grow that.

Let's talk about why growing corn or some other crop would make sense for you personally as a farmer.

That hasn't been emphasized as much here in North Carolina.

Just focusing on business plan and making sure that people know what their options are.

Second thing, I'll give you a good example.

Hazelnuts are a crop that would do really well here.

20 years ago, we didn't have hazelnut varieties that could take our humidity, but now we do.

So, why aren't we growing them?

Part of it is that it takes five years, you plant it, it takes five years to bare.

But banks know how to deal with it, they know how to structure loans to handle that.

The real obstacle is there is nowhere in this state that can take hazelnuts, break off the shells, and turn them into food, into nut butter, into nut milk, things like that.

So, the infrastructure is what we're missing.

There's nothing wrong with our farms, it's that we don't have the infrastructure.

So, if you look at any other industry, auto battery manufacturing, we have programs where a city or a county can say we want a battery manufacturing plant here.

We're gonna find a place for you, it's an old industrial site maybe that has all the utility access you need, we have a work force that fits what you need, and there's probably some tax incentives there too.

We do that to attract business.

The Mayor Of Greensboro said, I want to be a center of this manufacturing, let's make sure to draw that business early.

We do that for every single industry in this state, except agriculture, and we wonder why it's falling behind.

We should be doing that with food handling plants, we should do that with places to make hazelnuts into food, and all these other crops.

That's what we're not doing.

- As a leader, and you work with entrepreneurs, you would inherit as commissioner, a large team and a bureaucracy who by their account will say they're doing a great job and have grown the economy, and you're coming as a reformed candidate.

Of course, you're not the incumbant.

What would you say to them walking in the door, what would you expect of them, what kind of leader would they get and as a result, would our farmers get, or folks like me get who don't farm, but have an interest in having quality food sources?

- Right.

Well, I think first of all, it's very important to understand that the issues in our farm economy are not the fault of the staff at the Department of Agriculture.

They are doing their best with very limited resources.

Taking a look at the budgets with the information we have available as a member of the public, it looks to me like, a lot of the funding that that department gets, is not put to its best use.

And the employees certainly feel that.

The employees in every governmental department are experiencing shortfalls in budget, they're not getting paid enough to do the jobs they're doing, they can't afford to live where they work.

So, they understand better than everybody, what's ailing our Department of Agriculture.

So, they need leadership that's gonna support them in doing their jobs, that's gonna make sure that funding goes toward paying people to do the work we need done.

- Your relationship with the general assembly, if you come at this as a private entrepreneur citizen, how do you see yourself going down to Jones streets, what they call it, and increasing your influence, convincing budget writers, support the Department of Agriculture among all of the other agencies needing support?

- So, that is something that every leader is gonna face, working with the state legislature, making sure that you're in the priority list, that you have the priority and you have the budget to do what you need to do.

The state legislature, I look at how they're prioritizing the budget for the Department of Agriculture, and again, I don't feel the business development has been prioritized.

It has not been advocated for, and I think especially when you have a state legislature that's dominated by Republicans who really value business and growth, you should be able to communicate pretty clearly why investing in businesses is a good move for our state.

That's something I don't think is being done effectively in the way that it needs to be done, that's not where I'm seeing the budget for our State Department of Agriculture being prioritized.

It's not going towards business development, it's going towards other things.

Sometimes there's some feel good projects, business development is really not the top priority there and I think that should be a very easy slam dunk to give to a state legislature.

- We talked business development, you can focus energy on large farms where you get scale, which is big money, big economic development, or the small farmer.

And when you say, you talk about strawberries and $40,000 an acre, are you seeing more convincing people to setup shops in suburban areas, where it's pick-your-own?

Where's the growth going to be in this state under your administration?

Is it small farmers with that or is it more go out and help the bigger companies be more efficient?

- Right.

So, in agriculture, there is a place for everybody.

My clients have been everything from an Amish small family farm, to very large scale technology startups.

There is a place for everybody.

A small scale farm can serve market that the larger folks can't, and vice versa.

So it's not an issue of is one or the other more important, it's an issue of they're serving different needs, and we need to make sure that all the needs in our economy are being met.

So, in terms of business development, I find that often, the larger concerns are very good at searching out their own funding.

That doesn't mean we don't work with them to make sure we're doing the best we can, but they often already have the resources to seek out and secure that funding.

That's part of why they're large in the first place.

They usually had better access to capital.

The smaller ones tend to have more of a struggle with it, I think there's a lot that can be done to help smaller business work together so they're not all trying to share their, to bear the burden of running their farm by themselves.

Co-ops are a great model, we have some great models elsewhere in the US on how to do that, and how people can work together so that everybody's not isolated and working on their own.

That can help make investment into smaller concerns go a longer way.

- Dr. Sarah Taber is how you'll appear on the ballot, or Sara Taber, Democrat for the Commissioner of Agriculture in North Carolina.

Always, thank you for coming on, making the trip up to our studio to introduce yourself to the voters, and thank you for the conversation.

- Of course.

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