We’re joined by Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler. Now, Commissioner, now that the state budget is in place, what would you point to as the biggest wins for North Carolina agriculture?
“You know, I’ve been saying for years, one of the biggest problems for the future of ag in North Carolina is the disappearance of farmland. And over the last couple of years, we haven’t had very little money to spend, but this time the legislature stepped up, and we got almost $47 million in one-time funding. I also had $2 million in recurring money added for a total of $7 billion. So we are going to have about $54 million to spend on old farmland preservation, and this is a big win for the ag community. And to put it in perspective, I’ve been working on this for about 21 years, and we have spent about $108 million in 21 years total, and now we’re going to spend half of this in this coming year. So it’s wonderful.”
Well, of course, I know that ties into some of the growth pressures the state is dealing with, data centers obviously being one of those. And are we preserving farmland quickly enough to keep up with what we’re losing?
“Absolutely not. When you’re rank number two in the nation and the probability of the loss of farmland between now and 2040. You can’t do it fast enough. You ride the Interstate 85-40 corridor, and you see how much is going away. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to work, and I said, OK, I’m going to count how many farms I can see on the Interstate 40 between Greensboro and Raleigh. The answer was two ag fields I can see, and one of those was iffy. So, you know, it’s every county across the state, even our rural counties are losing land to housing development and everything you can imagine. So we can’t do it fast enough, and we’ve got to pick the pace up.”