Competing with New Jersey Agriculture: The Right Way to Come Back

Today’s announcement that Roche would be locating it’s new clinical transfer facility in the brand-new Alexandria Life Sciences Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side makes Lt. Governor Gudagno’s New Jersey’s agribusiness tour in August even more important, and hopefully we’ll be seeing more efforts like this.

Having been heavily engaged in the Roche negotiations and losing should serve as a wake-up call to Governor Christie and his administration that competing for jobs in the knowledge economy requires investments in intellectual capital resources such as public universities and in developing regional economic clusters that build off of the state’s competitive advantages.

Companies and creative class professionals want to locate near each other and not be reliant on traffic-choked highways to collaborate and meet.

By playing politics with the much-needed Rutgers University/UMDNJ merger last Spring, refusing to reverse the twenty-year decline in state funding to Rutgers, and killing transit projects, the Christie administration has failed to put together the basic building blocks needed to compete with a global city like New York for jobs and investments. It’s no surprise that the pharma industry is following the communications industry out the door and to other states when our state refuses to invest in the basics of success.

Education, transportation, and open space in the nation’s most densely populated state are essential to retaining and attracting companies and educated professionals. The days of growing an economy by offering tax incentives to build facilities in sprawling suburbs and on pancake flat farmland are gone. Those chickens have come home to roost in the form of traffic-choked highways, crumbling sewer and water infrastructures and property tax burdens that can barely meet the needs of municipal budgets and schools.

However, the New Jersey Department of Agriculture under the leadership of Secretary Doug Fisher, along with Lt. Governor Guadagno and her team, put together a tour of businesses in New Jersey’s agriculture and food sectors last August that highlighted this historic business ecosystem and the role it can play in New Jersey’s economic future. Throughout the month of August Lieutenant Governor Guadagno and Secretary Fisher visited both traditional and cutting edge food systems enterprises across the state.

New Jersey has 10,300 farms operating on roughly 550,000 acres of New Jersey’s 4.8 million acre land base and contributes annual sales of about $1.1 billion dollars to the state’s economy. The Rutgers Food Innovation Center in Bridgton has assisted in the development of 40 new food products while serving 1,300 clients and training over 1,000 people since its launch in 2001. The open space and watersheds associated with New Jersey agriculture also help power a $45 billion dollar tourism, fisheries and marine industry.

New Jersey’s true competitive advantages can be found in the development of regional food systems that serve some of our nation’s largest markets. It’s going to become increasingly difficult to compete for intellectual capital driven businesses with New York and Philadelphia when we refuse to invest in our public colleges and universities and play politics with our flagship AAU-member state university.

Losing Roche’s facilities to a city and state that is pursuing an aggressive and forward looking approach to developing overlapping ecosystems of knowledge-intensive industries should come as no surprise.

While we need to invest in our intellectual capital long-term, short and medium term solutions to New Jersey’s economic woes exist via our farms and food companies. Let’s make the right choices and invest in this industry and business ecosystem while protecting our rapidly dwindling land base and increasingly threatened watersheds.

Cross-posted at Blue Jersey

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Update on NJ’s “Fake Farmer’s” bill

I hate the colloquial on this legislation because I think it degrades small-scale farmers, but there are issues that this bill does do a good job addressing which I discussed in this post Beck Sweeny Bill on Farmland Assessment Clears Budget Committee.

Since I wrote this post the bill has cleared the NJ State Senate and the Star Ledger ran a Sunday Story on the bill.

The article emphasizes the potential loss of up to 398,000 acres of NJ farmland if the minimum agricultural sales required for property tax exemption was raised to $10,000, instead of the $,1000 currently in the bill. Those figures are based on a 2008 study by the NJ Agricultural Experiment Station. That’s almost half of the agricultural acreage in the state, which is a significant component of NJ’s open spaces.

The best part of the bill however are the proof of income requirements and the training that will be required of tax assessors in areas with significant agricultural activity. This should help ferret out some of the more egregious abuses and game-playing while protecting small holdings that are either leased to farmers or farmed by the owners themselves.

The next step is to get rigorous woodlands management plans in place for landowners who make property tax claims on their woodlot operations. That appears to be the area where most of the abuse occurs and is an area that falls outside of the purview of the NJ Department of Agriculture.

Perhaps consolidating all activities pertaining to open space property tax exemptions within the NJ Ag department could make review and enforcement easier. The department is already a significant player in open space management through it’s farmland preservation program and the State Agriculture Development Committee.

The bill goes through the State Assembly in the Fall and then hopefully to the Governor’s desk.

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NJ’s True Competitive Advantage: Local Farms and Regional Food Systems

Two interesting articles about the potential role of local agriculture in regional economic systems. The first from The New York Times: Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local focusing mainly on the small farm movement in the Pacific Northwest,

and the second from Gannett:
Rutgers looking to expand farming ‘incubators’ in Central Jersey.

Both articles are must reads and focus on the development of agriculture and food systems as key drivers of local economies.

The Times story focuses on the emergence of small farms as new loci of employment and economic development. On small farms labor is more likely to be a function of local employment and ownership and less dependent on seasonal migration from Latin America. This doesn’t mean a new nativism or displacement of migrant workers, but rather new opportunities.

The Times story discusses several Hispanic agripreneurs associated with Viva Farms which serves as a farming incubator for the Skagit Valley in Washington State.

In Minnesota a similar agripreneur project is run by the Rural Enterprise Center which is a program of the Mainstreet Project.

I had an opportunity to visit it in 2009 while on an extended trip to Minnesota: Small-Scale Poultry Processing – Rural Revolution in Minnesota? Rebirth in New Jersey?. In 2009 I wrote:

Traditionally, both rural New Jersey and upstate New York were home to small-scale, usually family run, chicken farms that supplied their local communities and immediate regions. Over the last twenty to thirty years many of these operations went out of business or were subsumed by large agribusiness enterprises like Perdue and Tyson. While land is prohibitively more expensive in New Jersey and in those areas of New York with good proximity to urban markets; small-scale, family run chicken farming might be an opportunity for the Garden State’s immigrant population. Many of these older farms in NJ and NY were run by first and second generation Eastern European immigrants and perhaps there’s an opportunity for the areas many Hispanic and Latino immigrants to develop family enterprises using the system being developed in Southern Minnesota.

Closer to home, Gannett reports that Robert Goodman, Executive Dean of Agriculture and Natural Resources is hoping to develop new “farming incubators” and food innovation centers in Central New Jersey, most likely in Somerset County. Rutgers already has a food innovation center deep in South Jersey in Bridgeton. According to Gannett, the existing Food Innovation Center at Rutgers has assisted in the development of 40 new food products while serving 1,300 clients and training over 1,000 people since it’s launch in 2001.

This is where New Jersey’s true competitive advantage lies, in the development of small farm enterprises, regional food systems and food innovation networks. With historic and unparallelled access to major urban markets throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, few regions or states can compete with the Garden State when it comes to local agricultural commerce.

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Beck/Sweeney Bill on NJ Farmland Assessment Clears Budget Committee

The so-called “fake farmers” bill passed out of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee yesterday.

The bill, a signature issue of State Senator Jennifer Beck raises required annual agricultural sales to $1000 per year, up from the current requirement of $500 per year.

The minimum acreage requirement remains at 5 acres which is a plus for new farmers in the state as well as for farmers who lease multiple plots of land from property owners in order to make a go of their farming operations. New Jersey has some of the most expensive and scarce farmland in the country and with the average age of the New Jersey farmer at 57, maintaining our state’s agricultural heritage and going farming concerns is an increasing challenge as the number of NJ farms increase while the average size of a New Jersey farm decreases.

The bill adds periodic reviews of the minimum sales requirement and annual evidence of agricultural sales is also required. Proof of income or sales must be submitted to the New Jersey Department of Agriculture.

Most importantly, tax assessors in farming intensive communities will now be required to be trained on farmland assessment in order to be licensed and the State Board of Taxation and State Board of Agriculture will now issue guidelines to help tax assessors identify and qualify legitimate farming activities.

As an interesting side note, the State Board of Agriculture is actually not the same entity as the NJ Department of Agriculture. Governance of the Ag sector in New Jersey is really quite interesting.

In brief, members of the State Board of Agriculture are elected by delegates at New Jersey’s annual state agricultural convention. Board members are then confirmed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the State Senate.

The State Board of Agriculture in turn governs the New Jersey Department of Agriculture. Any hiring or firing of NJ’s Secretary of Agriculture requires the consent of the State Board of Agriculture. It’s a system that’s been in place since 1914 and the formal establishment of the NJ Department of Agriculture. This system was kept in place even after the state modernized government with the passage of the new NJ State Constitution in 1947.

These changes to NJ’s farmland assessment law have been a long-time in coming.

The bill appears to be a very serious compromise around the very serious issues of open space and fair taxation.

Revenue requirements are higher and the state will now provide some guidance around what legitimate farming operations look like. Just leasing and housing goats to “mow” your lawn will no longer suffice to qualify as a farming activity. At least one would hope.

What I would really liked to have seen in the bill is a minimum holdings requirement that would require lands assessed as farmland to be held in agricultural use for a certain number of years, 5, 10, 15, maybe more. This would ensure prime NJ agricultural lands aren’t simply being banked until the real estate market improves.

Cross-posted at Blue Jersey

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NJ Spotlight Roundtable: The Growing Conflict over Smart Growth

For those interested in issues affecting New Jersey’s landbase, this event, NJ Spotlight Roundtable Series: The Growing Conflict Over Smart Growth,on Friday at 11:45am in Trenton looks like a very good event to attend.

John Weingart, the Associate Director of Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics is on the panel. John is very insightful when it comes to planning and environmental issues in New Jersey and held various senior level positions at NJDEP before coming to Eagleton.

His book Waste is a Terrible Thing to Mind is a fun read and details his efforts to find a site for NJ’s low-level radioactive waste via a collaborative and open effort. Read the book to find out what happened!

Other panelists include Dan Kennedy, Deputy Director, Office for Planning Advocacy, Business Action Center, Department of State, Eileen Swan, former Executive Director, Highlands Council, Peter Kasabach, Executive Director, New Jersey Future, Robert Antonicello, Executive Director, Jersey City Redevelopment Agency.

No one from NJDEP, the State Department of Agriculture or the State Agricultural Development Council is on the panel though, which I find quite interesting.

I won’t be able to attend though as I’ll be working in Manhattan Friday. But I look forward to reading New Jersey Spotlight’s excellent coverage.

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