Even though locally- and regionally-grown food is celebrated in Washington state, the reality is that fewer and fewer types of crops are being grown in the state, particularly west of the Cascades.
But if more and more people are wanting food grown close to home, why are crops that have been grown in the state for generations – like asparagus, strawberries, and barley – continuing to dwindle and disappear here?
It’s certainly not because of an inability to grow them in Washington. The range of climates and soils across the state can grow just about any kind of food, aside from things like tropical fruits. Washington’s agricultural economy has always been dominated by a long list of specialty crops. But for a crop to be produced anywhere, it takes more than just the possibility of growing it.
Jay Gordon, a sixth-generation Southwest Washington farmer, explained the ugly truth about why the list of crops grown in the state continues to dwindle, and how decisions in Olympia contribute to the decline.
Gordon, who also serves as policy director for the Washington State Dairy Federation, said the problem often is the loss of infrastructure, like canneries and mills, that it takes to process, package, store and sell those crops to a large population.
“When you not just lose the processors, but lose that infrastructure because the processor’s saying, ‘Look, I’m outta here, and I don’t want to compete against my own assets, so I’m going to bulldoze them,’ it’s really concerning, it’s just hard to see getting that back,” he said.
As the costs to grow and process food in Washington state continue to skyrocket, thanks in part to regulatory and tax burdens from Olympia, many food companies are finding it hard to remain profitable here, according to Gordon. So they move to other parts of the country, or even offshore, where land, labor, fuel, and many other inputs are much less expensive.
And Gordon said when they depart, they don’t want to leave behind a facility that one of their competitors could potentially buy and use, so they remove their equipment and flatten the facility before leaving.
A recent casualty of this struggle is the Great Western Malting mill in Vancouver, Wash., Gordon said. He had been one of a group of local farmers growing barley for the mill, but the closure’s left him trying to figure out what crop to switch to, as his options continue to dwindle.
Gordon listed several different companies across the state making similar moves, affecting tens of thousands of acres of crops.
“When you see five, six, seven, eight, nine old businesses shutting down over the last year and a half [to] two years, that’s kind of a trend line, that’s not the right direction,” said Gordon.
He points to Washington’s 2021 Climate Commitment Act as another cost burden for companies that’s accelerating this harmful trend. Gordon said that if new regulatory costs like the CCA’s carbon tax create a situation where it’s easier for companies to leave rather than be able to innovate to meet new standards, not only does the region lose, but ultimately so does the climate.
Gordon’s hope is to raise awareness of the issue among lawmakers in Olympia to encourage a different approach to regulating the regional food system that encourages positive changes without causing the loss of infrastructure and diverse food crops.
“Really what the Climate Commitment Act should be doing is sending a signal not to run, but to invest and innovate,” said Gordon.
Dillon Honcoop is the communications director at Save Family Farming, a Whatcom County-based organization dedicated to advocating for family farmers.