TheFirstFurrow

When most people think of agriculture they envision row crops, large tractors or animals like cows and chickens. But at North Carolina Farm Bureau we recognize that our state’s great heritage of feeding the world goes beyond the land through our aquaculture and seafood industries. North Carolina produces some of the finest seafood in the world ranging from trout in the Great Smoky Mountains to blue crabs in the Outer Banks. Many coastal communities depend on the seafood industry to create jobs and support their local economy, but the seafood and aquaculture industries support thousands of American jobs throughout the seafood supply chain.

This weekend, seafood lovers from all over will head to Morehead City to celebrate our great seafood industry at the NC Seafood Festival. The event, which begins this Friday, September 30^th and runs through Sunday, October 2^nd, will feature live music, great food, cooking demonstrations and even a boat show. The NC Seafood Festival takes place each year to “promote the positive social and economic impact of the seafood industry on the citizens of North Carolina.”

More information about the NC Seafood Festival is available at www.ncseafoodfestival.org.

Written by Dan Gerlach, President of the Golden LEAF Foundation.

The Golden LEAF Foundation was created to ensure to ensure there would be dedicated resources to help transform the economy of rural, tobacco-dependent and economically distressed communities in North Carolina.

During my more than 20 years in North Carolina and my almost eight years as President of Golden LEAF, there’s no doubt in my mind that the heart and soul of the innovation, creativity, risk-taking, vision, and significance of North Carolina can be found in the farmer and grower.

Earlier this year, the Golden LEAF Board of Directors stepped out of our usual grantmaking processes to create a fund to support the development of major industrial sites across North Carolina. This fund would reduce the time it takes a big manufacturer to be build a plant and hire North Carolina workers, exporting product all over the United States and all over the world. With this $25 million, there would be no requirement that a company be committed, but rather faith that this seed corn would facilitate the location of good-paying manufacturing jobs to North Carolina. Manufacturing has long been part of rural North Carolina’s past, and certainly important to its future – though in a different way.

So it should be no surprise that our Board of Directors made one of the biggest commitments in our history – $45 million – to ensure that a facility on NC State’s Centennial Campus in Raleigh to house the Plant Sciences Initiative would be built. Manufacturing and agriculture are the two great workhorses of our rural economy, and are a major part of our future as well.

Written by Jason Gray, Senior Fellow of Research and Policy at the North Carolina Rural Center

Connection to place and land is the heart of rural North Carolina. It is what defines rural from urban. It also reflects the positive connection of what we do to where we live. Rural work and culture is not, as some would have us believe, “nonurban” – a null set waiting to become something else. The rural life has inherent worth and value.

Agriculture is a major expression of this worth and value. The North Carolina Rural Center believes that the sustainable, productive use of land, timber and marine fisheries is one of the defining characteristics of rural life, despite the inherent physical and financial challenges. North Carolina’s strategic location in the middle of the eastern seaboard places its agricultural production near a large percentage of the country’s population. The topographical variety and temperate climate makes North Carolina an agriculturally diverse state, second only to California. One of the greatest job creation opportunities available to rural North Carolina is the focused effort to increase the amount of value-added production that occurs near where the product is grown. Continued good stewardship of our state’s immense natural resources affords us the opportunity to maintain a desirable quality of life.

In April of this year the Rural Center released a ten point advocacy package. More than just a policy advocacy package to engage state and federal policy makers, it is also a statement of what we believe works. Advocacy point #8 is Develop Opportunities for Agriculture and Natural Resources, including Biotechnology and Value-Added Food Processing. We identified the following sub-strategies to do this:

It’s been more than 100 years since our last boom in the wine industry, when North Carolina led the nation in wine production until Prohibition in the 1920s. In fact, North Carolina is home to the first cultivated wine grape in the US – the scuppernong. Luckily for wine drinkers, grape growers and wineries, the industry has rebounded in a big way. In the past 15 years, North Carolina’s Wine and Grape Industry has flourished as large and small investments in grape growing and wine production are increasing and winery tourism has taken off. This week, we will spotlight the growing economic impact of the Wine and Grape Industry.

Last week we discussed a couple of reasons some farmers choose to sell their farm products locally at farmers markets, roadside stands, and pick-your-own sites. While selling locally is an important market for some farmers, others are venturing into new markets through international trade.

The following appears courtesy of NC State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Agriculture and agribusiness — food, fiber and forestry — make up an $84 billion a year industry in North Carolina, contributing one-sixth of the state’s income and employees, according to the latest figures from NC State University economist Mike Walden.

In calculating value-added incomes for 2014 (the latest year for which figures are available), Walden found that food, fiber and forestry industries contributed more than 17 percent of the state’s $482 billion gross state product.

These industries also accounted for 686,200 of the state’s 4 million employees, according to Dr. Walden, a William Neal Reynolds professor and North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist. That’s up 23,000 from the previous year.

Walden said that overall value-added income from the state’s agricultural and agribusiness sector grew by 10 percent from 2013, when it contributed $76 billion to the state’s economy.

Walden says that the rise in North Carolina agriculture and agribusiness coincides with overall national economic growth of 2.2 percent in 2014, with much of the increase coming from the processing sector.

“Both tobacco product and food processing had big gains in value-added, the value of production at the processing level, in 2014. This reflects the rebound in those sectors consistent with a general economic rebound,” he said. “There was also a more modest improvement in wood product processing.”

Last week, we talked about the benefits to consumers of buying farm products locally at farmers markets and roadside stands. Today, we’re going to discuss a couple of ways farmers can benefit from selling farm products locally.

Nearly everyone who has traveled a North Carolina highway has been behind a log truck or seen trees being cut down. Maybe this drums up thoughts of a forest industry working to provide everyday items like paper towels and toilet paper, toothpaste, paints, furniture or 2x4s for your next home improvement project. On the other hand, maybe it brings to mind questions about how many trees are being cut down and how this affects the environment. Since yesterday was “Forestry Day in the Legislature”, we’ll take a look at five things that everyone should know about North Carolina’s forestry sector and hopefully debunk a few misconceptions along the way.