Redland Rambles

Several months ago, I had the chance to interview Katie Edwards. She is running for State Representative, District 119, and is currently the executive director of Farm Bureau. Katie is quite familiar with issues that affect growers in South Dade; and since I blog about growers, our interview focused on agricultural issues.

I have not contacted or interviewed her opponents Frank Artiles, Nestor A. Iglesias, and Graziella Renee Denny. I did  look at their web sites to see where they stand on the issues. Iglesias doesn’t have one. Denny’s web site is completely blank. And Artiles is concerned about the economy, jobs, property tax issues, education, healthcare — everything under the sun except local ag! Do any of these candidates know where their food comes from? Do they care about who grows their food? It appears that only Katie does.

Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday November 2nd!

MW: What does Farm Bureau do?

KE: Farm Bureau is a membership organization. We have about 4 thousand members,  about 2100 who are actively engaged in farm production. All of the vegetable farmers are FB members. About 80 percent of the nursery growers are Farm Bureau members. Most of the tropical fruit growers I represent, apiaries or beekeepers, and aquaculture. That would be everything from koi and Everglades ciclid to the Everglades alligator farms. So what we do represent in terms of membership is incredibly diverse. Most of our membership lives here in South Miami-Dade County.

MW: Tell me about your job with Farm Bureau.

KE: I’ve worked with Farm Bureau  for about seven years now, and I reach out to politicians and like to get them down here so that they can fully appreciate the impact of their decisions. I want them to remember the nursery growers and farmers down in Homestead, and to think about those family farmers when they vote on a bill.

One thing very important to Farm Bureau and to me is helping educate policy makers so that there is an appreciation for agriculture, the state’s leading industry, and also for them to recognize that within their own county we’re the ones producing the food. So you have to look at it very holistically and reach out to the people outside of our borders.

MW: There’s been a lot in the local media about the freeze. How have you been putting a face to the farmer, and what kind of feedback have you gotten?

Katie Edwards

KE: When people think about a freeze and agriculture, people think, how is this going to impact the price of orange juice? Consumers don’t realize the amount of capital that the grower already has in the ground from the very moment that seed is sown. You’ve got your land rent, you’ve got your labor expenses, so when a freeze comes and wipes out and devastates your crop, you still have expenses that you can’t recover and pass along.

Sometimes it’s a race against time because every season you’re getting essentially a four-month window to make make enough money to cover your expenses, and then maybe offset money that you lost last year. And the last couple of seasons we’ve had a very difficult time trying to keep up with fertilizer and fuel expenses.

The other thing is going forward, this freeze helps us remember how important American agriculture is. If we don’t have a safe domestic food supply that can produce for all of us during the winter months, then we’re dependent on foreign countries.

MW: Are there any subsidies for growers here in Florida?

KE: The subsidies are for primarily commodities. Just so you understand, the stuff we grow here is not subsidized. So 97 percent of what Florida produces is not subsidized, maybe some peanuts and a little bit of tobacco and some cotton in the Panhandle, which accounts for 3 percent. But everything that we grow down here are not commodities. Like the old saying, we’re price takers not price makers.

MW: What’s your position on the UDB?

KE: When I go downtown and speak [before the county commission], I choose my battles carefully and I choose them wisely, because if I’m always going downtown against something, you lose credibility very quickly. I’ve seen that happen to people in this area. But with the UDB, we’re not one of the organizations that’s out there in bed with the developers saying we want to have more projects. I mean the Parkland project scares us, because if I lose 900 acres of agricultural land, that’s the chink in the chain. It’s like, you can get one, it can go right after that. And what about the property rights of the guy — we all have property rights — what about the property rights of the guy next to him? Doesn’t he have the right to keep farming without being a nuisance to homeowners and all the ancillary issues that goes along with that? He made an investment, he wants to continue farming. I have to protect his rights too.

I think we can all agree that we want to have agriculture in Southwest Miami-Dade County. I don’t think there’s anybody that says, I don’t want agriculture here. And if they do, I’d be very surprised. But I think a common goal — and I like to look at the commonalities — we all want to have agriculture here in Miami-Dade. So I look at it and say ok, take the UDB issue off the table, and let’s spend our time, our resources, our capital, talking about what we can all do to help make sure that farmers aren’t forced to make the difficult decision to then have to sell to the developer. That’s the whole crux of the problem.

Tell me what you’re doing to help the local farmers. I want to do my own reality TV show and call it Do You Want To Be A Farmer, and invite all these people to come down here. I’m going to say to them, you go to the bank, you go to farm credit, take out a loan for 10 million dollars, I want to see you make a buck. They wouldn’t know what end was up and even how to turn a damn tractor! I’ve said that for years, that’s what I’m up against. I’m losing farmers to foreign competition and you guys aren’t helping the farmers out.

(To be continued)