Urban lawmakers lack farmer respect

About six weeks ago, I had a “cardiac episode.”

As I laid in the emergency room, thinking about my to-do list and wondering what I could do for the people who were contacting me regularly asking for help with policies in Olympia that threatened their farms or ranches, the irony of my “heart problem” was entirely lost on me.

I have not worked in public policy for very long, but I have been a farmer my entire life. Even when I’ve held other jobs or lived elsewhere, when I came home, I was a farmer.

The first morning of the legislative session, my husband found me in my home office with tears running down my face. I’d received an email from a farmer asking for help to save their farm from a bill that would put them out of a job they’d done their entire life – just like me. It was the first of many I received this session. Messages like these are, almost literally, heartbreaking.

“How,” I thought, “could a state like ours be so callous toward the community that keeps it fed?”

I was preoccupied by this question to the point of sleeplessness and a loss of appetite.

This preoccupation culminated with the hearing on the riparian “buffer bill” – HB 1838. The bill would have required farmers and ranchers to give up valuable, productive farmland to plant trees for fish habitat with little compensation. Then, after having their livelihoods taken from them, those same farmers and ranchers would have been tasked with upkeep of that habitat in perpetuity, or until they were forced to sell their farms to find a livelihood elsewhere. To cap it all off, science shows much of the buffer being demanded would have little-to-no impact on fish conservation anyway.

It was a farm killer – a governor-requested bill that would’ve decimated agriculture.

Hearing people who had never farmed or ranched talk about the existence of so many people like it was disposable was enraging. For the most part, farmers and ranchers believe in conservation because it is beneficial for agriculture, the land and wildlife. Farmers and ranchers are professional appreciators of natural things and believe in their preservation because they consider themselves a part of nature.

But there were droves of people from Seattle and other urbanized areas making assumptions, rights groups and activist coalitions whose testimony made clear they believed they knew better.

In an era that allegedly espouses inclusion, empathy and diversity of thought, very few of those ideals were on display when it comes to discussion of agricultural policy in Olympia this session. Instead, we in the agricultural community have been labeled as environmental degraders, salmon destroyers, killers, polluters, and more by people who do not know us or have any experience doing what we do. And those casting these stones seem oblivious to the fact that we raise and harvest the plant and life that becomes the food they eat. They seem to see farms as uniquely harmful to the environment while looking down from paved areas that removed most evidence of their natural state long ago.

The food producers of Washington are a small but mighty minority, accounting for less than 1% of the total population of our state but managing to create the second largest industry. Washington’s farmers are recognized as national and global leaders in food production.

Yet, our own legislators seem zealously eager to find ways to put us out of business. Agriculture is a cornerstone of food production, job creation and environmental stewardship in Washington. It is the heart of Washington. Unless we change, the “cardiac episode”

I had this legislative session will be mild compared to a self-inflicted one that will strike at the heart of this state and stop the beating heart of the industry that feeds us.

In other words, we may soon see what it looks like to live in a place where management of the land is left to distant politicians rather than people on the ground, whose jobs depend upon a healthy ecosystem for survival.

— Pam Lewison is the agriculture research director at the Washington Policy Center and a potato farmer in Moses Lake.