New Jersey’s critical issues are intertwined. Not only must we diversify our economy so that we don’t continue to be overly dependent on the pharmaceutical and financial services sectors, we need to create jobs, we need to preserve open space and we need to eat and source more local foods.
Between 1971 and 2002 New Jersey lost 384,000 acres of farmland. New Jersey’s farmland is disappearing more quickly than any other source of land cover in the entire state. Our forests and wetlands are also showing huge declines and combined New Jersey’s farms, forests and wetlands lost 672,000 acres between 1971 and 2002 in a state of only 4.8 million acres.
So, the percent of developed land in NJ increased by nine points while the percent of farms, forests and wetlands decreased by fourteen points during this thirty year period. Meanwhile, NJ’s manufacturing employment declined by forty eight percent – the second largest U.S. decline in the United States — over a similar thirty year period.
So our farmlands have declined by forty two percent, our manufacturing by 48%, our cities are hollowed out and we deal with suburban sprawl on a daily basis. What needs to be done? Can Governor Christie’s administration reverse this decline? Or will they just continue mindlessly along the same path as previous administrations? Or worse, will they reverse the gains we have made in watershed protection, wetlands conservation and farmland preservation in the name of job creation?
Sustainable job creation should not and cannot come solely from construction and development. We can’t continue to pave and build over our remaining farms, fields and streams and expect New Jersey to remain a livable, competitive state. We’re seeing more and more pharma businesses decamping for the New Haven to Cambridge corridor and for all and intents and purposes we’re no longer competitive as a state in telecommunications. In fact we really lost our telecomm advantage over 10 years ago when we failed to invest in all the talent being spun off from AT&T and Lucent to build small businesses and competitive R&D capabilities in mobile communications and data networking
So what’s the solution? The best long-term solution is for our political leaders to think hard about our sources of competitive advantage as a state. Two of our key sources of competitive advantage just happen to be location and our soil. We’re an incredibly fertile state and for much of our history our truck farms, dairies and poultry farmers supplied nearby states with produce, fruit, eggs, milk and butter.
Tourism is a $38 billion dollar industry in NJ – the state’s third largest according to Global Insights. That’s a lot of potential meals, snacks and take-back-home foods that could be fueled by locally grown and produced foods. Rather than thinking about construction jobs and housing developments as a way to put New Jerseyans back to work we really need to be thinking about long-term jobs that pay good wages and benefits on an annual, not seasonal basis. When I was growing up being a butcher was a good middle class job and you could actually put your kids through college, now, not so much.
If we start to think about New Jersey’s industries from a competitive advantage point of view, we will quickly begin to see that continued development across our remaining open spaces is not the best business development solution for New Jersey’s long-term success.
Instead, we should aggressively seek to preserve our remaining farms, fields, forests and streams while redeveloping a locally owned food processing industry that can source local foods to our $38 billion dollar tourism industry, our supermarkets, our homes and nearby cities like New York and Philadelphia. And I would argue that new NJ food processing businesses can become a critical part of cities in desperate need of new enterprises and small businesses that provide good jobs.
Next Week – Land Branding, Farmland Preservation and the Jersey Fresh Program – a critical building block for success.
[...] little over a year and a half ago I looked at New Jersey’s land base numbers in my post Farms, Open Space Preservation and Business Development: Perfect Together. Over a thirty year period, New Jersey lost 384,000 acres of farmland to development in a state of [...]