The South Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture Hugh Weathers has just wrapped up something of a marathon session of meetings, taking about a day and a half to talk about strategic planning for agriculture in South Carolina. First of all, what brought this all about, and what happened?
“Well, we’ve been thinking about it for months that it has been a while since we stepped back and sort of evaluated where the industry is. Lot of challenges the last few years, and with the maybe changing environment in Washington and other places, the uncertainties, it was just a good time to have a group come together and evaluate how we should position agriculture going forward.”
So what were some of the topics and action points that came out of this?
“Well, we did the usual process of saying what our strengths, what our weaknesses, opportunities, threats we all prior to the meeting, had what we called a collective risk assessment, what things represent, risks that have would have a high impact and a likelihood of happening. So how do you position yourself be ready for that? So obviously, with the challenges facing farmers, with regards to profitability right now, that was a theme land and alternative uses and conversion of farmland away from production. That was a theme of a challenge, labor supply. How do you get both trained labor and general labor as a supply? Do we want to look at crop diversification a little stronger for South Carolina? You know? How do we let South Carolinians know the value of agriculture, not just economically, but for a whole host of reasons of what it means to our state, especially going forward with our state developing so much and now five and a quarter million residents that call South Carolina home. How do we remind our new neighbors as to the value that agriculture brings to South Carolina.”
You know, some of the things that you mentioned there, it strikes me that some of those things seem to be sort of out of your control there. There are things of a almost a global nature there. How do you approach issues like that?
“That’s a great observation. Number one, we focus on what we can do something about but then, in addition to that, we get a message to the public that these are issues facing South Carolina agriculture, but we talked about one of our strengths is our location. And just like you said, you can’t do anything about that, and it’s a great advantage. So let’s just highlight it. How do you take a string and highlight it even more? And so how do you take a weakness that we might identify, like labor shortage, land costs. How do you do your best to minimize that weakness? So it’s not a paralyzing thing to the departments, right? So it was an exercise like that, and as we left, we gave ourselves some assignments, and the group of thinking, 2526 all sort of said they would take one of four tasks that we identified as pillars going forward, I think conservation, stabilization, communication and innovation. So everybody sort of divided up, and we’re going to try to come back in August and get a little bit of a report card, if you will, on putting together a campaign. And one suggestion for an overarching campaign was like, ag forward South Carolina. Ag forward again, focusing on the future. So that’s what we I was real pleased at the input and the real desire to come forward with something by the group who gave up and invested a day and a half of their time from all over the state, a couple hours away and so but they all came together, and we came out with a sort of a plan going forward.”
If you could, what are some of the groups or constituencies that were represented in that group?
“We had farmers so we had production agriculture. We had buyers, wholesalers of fruit and veg. We had buyers of commodities, grain, corn, wheat, soybeans. We had academics with Clemson and South Carolina State, we had advocates organizations like Farm Bureau, Forestry Association, Palmetto AgriBusiness Council, had several of my staff from the department that served sort of, as you know, facilitators when we broke into the smaller groups to really dig in. So again, we worked hard to pull together a group that brought a broad diversification. We’re very successful in that, and with the quality of input that we got, it was it was born out that we had picked some good people to be around the table.”
Well, it’ll be exciting to see what comes of this. You say the next meeting is in August.
Well, we want to get some of those four groups to dig in and bring the whole group back together in August. We’re sort of sum them all up and have a have a campaign of sorts going forward.