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Summit panel’s outlook for ag one of promise, significant challenges
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
For all the talk of developing industry clusters to replace the state’s first-generation manufacturing and textile mills, agriculture remains the bedrock of South Carolina’s economy.
At least that was the consensus of half the speakers at the first state agricultural summit, held Oct. 26 at the Riviera Theater at Charleston Place.
“The things that gave South Carolina a light in the beginning are going to give South Carolina a bright future going forward,” said Darla Moore, founder and chairwoman of the Palmetto Institute, which hosted the event.
Her husband, billionaire investor Richard Rainwater, suggested that the state’s farmers, thanks to the Port of Charleston, are perfectly situated to profit from the population and economic growth of China and India.
The other two keynoters, S.C. Agriculture Commissioner Hugh Weathers and Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown, took a much more restrained view. There are real opportunities on the horizon, both said, but with significant challenges between here and there.
Weathers described the state’s farms as an economic driver under tremendous market pressure, while Brown seemed to assert that while there are opportunities ahead, they’ll come only if the federal and state lawmakers embrace the challenges of global warming and diminishing fossil fuel supplies and agree to a fundamental restructuring of the nation’s tax code.
Ag’s economic impact: $35 billion
About 200 people attended the conference, a significant number for an inaugural event that featured only a lunch and four speakers.
But the high attendance and the audience’s attentiveness during the seminar was indicative of the seriousness with which people view the $35 billion annual economic impact of the state’s agriculture and timber operations, second only to tourism in the amount of money it pumps into the economy.
The industry now accounts for some 460,000 workers, and about a quarter of the state’s land is used to grow some form of crop, Weather told the audience.
On the plus side, South Carolina is blessed with what Weathers described as a “very diversified” agricultural economy.
“Given our size and that diversity, we should be nimble enough to change to meet the world’s needs and the challenges ahead,” he said.
The problem is fewer people are going into farming, and many are finding it impossible to resist the lure of selling their land for more profitable development. In 1980, S.C. farmers tended 6.4 million acres; in 2004, that figure was 4.85 million.
“Today, the average South Carolina farmer is 56 years old, and operators of more than half the state’s 24,000 farms do something other than farming as their primary occupation,” said Weathers, himself a third-generation dairy farmer raising Holstein cows in Bowman.
The agriculture secretary said while farming and related activities continue to support most of the rural economies in the state, competition for space and high land values is causing many farmers to cash in while they can.
Differentiate S.C. products
“Most farmers are considered land rich and asset poor,” Weathers said. “For a lot of farmers, traditionally, their retirement is their land. That’s changing and that’s bad news for our rural communities because as agriculture goes, so go those areas.”
The effect of development on adjacent farmland is something few have taken the time to consider, Weathers said.
“The development of an industrial park next to prime agricultural land encourages the development of more land,” he explained. “We need South Carolinians to realize that there’s a link between agriculture, natural resources, sustainable development and that land protection programs are important and should be encouraged.”
Despite his concerns, Weathers said he remains an optimist, generally.
“As a farmer, I think you have to be (optimistic) by nature,” he said.
Weathers sees significant opportunity in growing crops as an alternative energy source and in things such as agri-tourism. But he said perhaps the greatest prospect for tangible gains lies in better marketing of the South Carolina brand.
“I don’t mean to bring Stephen Colbert into this, but Colbert is right,” he said, referring to the television host and native Charlestonian who recently lambasted Georgia’s use of the “Peach State” moniker. “South Carolina produces far more peaches annually than Georgia does, and the sugar is superb.
“We have to do better at competing in global markets, and we have to differentiate South Carolina products not only on the store shelves of Charleston, but around the world.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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