Vilsack to Work on Ag Markets
Published: Friday, March 12, 2021
Sustainable farming is commonplace throughout Indiana, Michigan and the nation. Sustaining the farmers who practice it is becoming increasingly difficult, however.
Consequently, discovering and promoting new ways to boost farm income will be one of the USDA's primary objectives during the next four years, new Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack during his speech that closed the virtual Commodity Classic last Friday.
Vilsack's remarks mirrored those of industry executives who on Thursday informed Commodity Classic participants of their vision for making agriculture climate smart and profitable for decades to come.
Zero tillage, cover crops, carbon sequestration, rotational grazing, crop diversity and other innovations could pay dividends for farmers and the environment.
"Farmers profit by embracing practices that we know are climate smart, that we know produce regenerative results, that we know will improve the soil health," Vilsack said. "By investing in those practices, we're also going to do right by the environment, and we're also going to be right by climate, and by creating opportunities, perhaps through a carbon bank of sorts, that would be focused and designed specifically to benefit farmers."
Finding new revenue streams is critical because data suggests green acres isn't necessarily the place to be anymore.
"I understand and appreciate that every farmer, every rancher, every producer in the country has gone through a very, very difficult time," Vilsack said. "With commodity prices being challenging, with COVID, with all of the other issues that you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, I realize how difficult it has been."
Vilsack said that while agriculture has changed significantly since he first served as ag secretary from 2009-17, he said he "is a different person coming into this role a second time. I'm learning and re-learning a lot."
What he knows for sure is, more than 20 percent of the American workforce is involved in the food and agriculture industry and its economic health is vital. Vilsack referenced an Economic Research Service statistic indicating that that 89.6 percent of American farm families do not derive the majority of their income from their farming operations.
"Saying this another way, nearly 90 percent of American farmers require off-farm income by themselves with a job, a spouse's job or maybe even the kids are working as well off the farm in order to maintain and keep the farm," Vilsack said. "That is a very difficult statistic for a secretary of agriculture to repeat to a group of producers.
"It suggests we need to do a lot better job and a lot more work to create a situation and an industry where more people can make the majority of what they make from what they want to do and what they love to do."
One of USDA's goals under Vilsack will be making farm work the primary source of income for farm families.
"The focus for us over the course of the next several months, and frankly for the next four years, is going to be on markets" he said. "More markets, better markets, newer markets and fairer markets,
"I begin with trade because 20-30 percent of what is grown and raised in the country ultimately is exported. We need to continue to focus on providing greater presence for U.S. products in (key) markets. More markets involve, as well, the enforcement of trade agreements that have been entered into and enforced in a way that those trade agreements were negotiated—I'm speaking specifically of the USMCA.
"More markets also means looking at ways in which we potentially could have new trade agreements."
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