Released by Southeast AgNet …
By Nancy Smith
It seems every legislative session there’s one pariah — an issue so unpopular it can barely buy a committee hearing let alone a vote. Among the notable pariahs I remember over the years were school choice, gambling and, of course, guns. There have been others.
But none was as vital to the Florida economy as this year’s pariah, agriculture.
It seems to me we plain didn’t like ag at the Capitol this session.
Never mind that for more than 120 years, agriculture — ranching included — was Florida’s fiscal bedrock. It still is. It’s second only to tourism as the state’s most valuable industry, employing two million people and each year contributing more than $120 billion to the state economy.
But we all know what happened to the politicians last year who campaigned on the merits of Florida agriculture. Ask Adam Putnam and Matt Caldwell, for instance. Those poor devils proudly defended farming AND the Second Amendment. In November they disappeared quicker than a couple of American tourists at a Bolivian taxi stand.
It’s no mystery how ag became a pariah:
The new governor and the Everglades Foundation’s paid posse blamed agriculture — specifically, Big Sugar — for poisoning the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee Rivers with blue-green algae, and the Gulf with fish-killing red tide. Never mind that science never supported a word of it.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The biggest move to pariah-ize agriculture came about six weeks before the Legislature convened, when Gov. Ron DeSantis fired the entire South Florida Water Management District Governing Board for having the nerve to follow the law and extend a sugar company’s lease. And then, even though ag is a District stakeholder, the governor appointed not a single representative from agriculture among the board’s replacements. I believe for legislators who wanted to curry favor with DeSantis, that alone became a powerful statement.
The mass removal was a show of revenge. As one senator told me, “The governor has made it plain, it’s agriculture or clean water. This isn’t a year we can like both, and nobody is prepared to challenge him.”
So, lawmakers found it easy-peasy to throw one of the state’s most effective tools for protecting Old Florida, the Rural Family Lands Protection Program, under the bus.
I truly believe casting this 18-year-old, good-news program adrift and unfunded is one of the 2019 session’s biggest fails.