You would never believe it today, but before agriculture was an environmentalist's dirty word, it was a friendly word, a romantic word, a word that gave us hope -- something Florida editors rallied to sell as a savior of precious green belt.
I was one of those editors, have been for decades and remain so to this day. Let me tell you why.
Florida farmland wasn't always confined to the middle of the state. It was a diverse and awesome spectacle in 1977 when our family first came from England via New Hampshire to settle in Martin County.
One of the things I loved most about Martin County, something you can barely find a trace of now, was the abundance of flower farms. Martin County -- and I mean less than a mile from the Intracoastal Waterway clear to I-95, 12 miles west of Palm City -- was known as the Cut-Flower Capital of America.
Try to imagine flying over Stuart and Palm City at midnight, looking down from 5,000 feet and seeing lights over a city shining brighter than Miami's. Tourists who didn't know better must have wondered what in the world was going on down there. It was thousands upon thousands of acres of flowers being force-grown in special greenhouses, kept under artificial sunlight from dusk until dawn.
But as years progressed, Mexico plain out-competed us. They could grow and distribute flowers cheaper than we could. Developers, meanwhile, snatched up most of the flower farmland for condos and shopping precincts. In fact, The Stuart News building you see today along U.S. 1 was built on former flower land in 1990, after the farmer who had been growing chrysanthemums there for generations threw in the towel.
Waking up on fall mornings to the sweet aroma of orange blossoms reminded us in Martin County how close we were to farming. In fact, agriculture was always in the air -- or, so we hoped! When we smelled smoke in the air, we always prayed it was from the south -- from cane growers burning their fields. One morning I remember the smoke was coming from the north. My heart sank. I knew what was happening: General Development Corp. was burning thousands upon thousands of acres that abutted the Savannas Preserve so it could build out Port St. Lucie east of U.S. 1.
I used to have long talks with Joe Crankshaw, after he came from The Miami Herald to work for us at the News, about how we could produce stories to help farmers so they wouldn't sell their land to developers. It was something he cared deeply about, too.
It was even a discussion topic at a Florida Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in the late 1980s -- agriculture, the hedge against development creep we never wanted to see go away.
I mention that now because I'm tired of hearing environmentalists demean agriculture in one-dimensional terms, as a polluter of the Florida environment, as if it has no rules, no stringent regulation of its practices, no conscience, no concern for the land itself and no value in a state overwhelmed with environmental challenges.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
And, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam inspired me to write this column. He doesn't know it, but he did.
Did you hear him last week when he spoke at the Palm Beach International Agricultural Summit? Probably not. The event should have been, but wasn't, live-streamed, and only a handful of media covered it.
As the Palm Beach Post described it, the Summit "focused on Palm Beach County’s 1,400 farms, the food they produce, from sweet corn to sugar cane, the water and technology they require to produce it, and their future."
While farming isn’t particularly sexy or glamorous, Putnam said, it’s what built Florida. “It’s what sustained Florida through the greatest collapse in housing prices and tourism numbers ever experienced.”
“Agriculture is a very large frog in a very important pond that we need to appreciate, brag about, celebrate and recognize,” Putnam said. “It’s not Old MacDonald’s Farm. There is a tendency in modern life to view it that way. It’s big. It’s important. It’s global, and it is high-tech.”
What he also said, which I know to be true from the people I've known, "farmers take an entrepreneurial risk every day, year in and year out as they plant crops they hope will survive too much or too little rain, heat or competition from imports." It's soul-stirring stuff just to think about, this lifestyle -- something most of us can't possibly comprehend.
Agriculture is the second-largest water user in Florida, second only to public water demand. Farmers care about water. Do you really think they would be OK with destroying their means of making a living?
I guess my point in all this is simple. Agriculture today is just as it was in 1977, 1987, 1997. Farms are still important, farmers still struggle. Instead of waging war on agriculture and the people who farm the land, why aren't environmentalists planning an all-out assault on government inertia? Wage war on that. Ask yourself, where are the incentives for farmers not to sell out?
In Palm Beach County alone, where it ranks first in Florida, agriculture registers $1 billion in sales of crops at the farm level and a $10 billion economic impact. People can't see it -- out of sight out of mind, apparently -- but it makes up more than a third of the county’s 2,000 square miles.
I believe the Palm Beach International Agricultural Summit would have been an eye-opener for all Floridians if they had been able to see it. Certainly it reminded me again why I care.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
Comments
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