A Farm Policy that Creates Jobs and Helps Rebuild Struggling Economies

Mark Coe

Michigan’s economy had plunged into a deep recession well before the rest of the United States followed in 2008. From 2000-2009, Michigan led the nation in job losses: nearly one of every four jobs lost was in Michigan.¹ The manufacturing sector has been the mainstay of Michigan’s economy ever since Henry Ford and the rise of the U.S. auto industry. Despite the recent hard times, manufacturing is still a significant sector. As in much of the rest of the Rust Belt, many manufacturers in Michigan have scaled back production, moved overseas, or simply gone out of business.

Few sectors of Michigan’s economy have shown more potential to get people back to work than agriculture. Agriculture is now the second most-productive sector of the Michigan economy, behind what remains of the once-dominant manufacturing sector. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, is keen to point out that agriculture in Michigan is a $71 billion industry and provides one of every four jobs in the state.² This is especially noteworthy because Michigan agriculture receives much less federal support than states dominated by program crops. Over the last 30 years, as most Midwestern states were losing rural population, Michigan led the region in rural population gains.³

Michigan’s agricultural sector is defined by its diversity. The state is second only to California in the number of crops it produces. In the southern part of the state, corn and soybeans are plentiful, and Michigan also has a thriving dairy sector. But what the state is mainly known for is the wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and horticultural products grown there. USDA refers to these as specialty crops (as opposed to program crops). The federal government supports specialty crops mainly through conservation programs and investments in agricultural research and extension. With these crops, technology plays a less important role in determining the sector’s production capacity. Rather, specialty crop production is labor intensive—and therefore creates many more jobs than program crops.

Mark Coe is one of the many Michigan residents who have found a niche in agriculture after major upheaval in their previous industries. Coe owned a photography development business in Mount Pleasant, MI, a bustling city compared to his hometown, Kaleva, a small town where he grew up surrounded by farms. The digital revolution in photography swept in so fast that it put Coe and most of his competitors out of business. In his early 40s, he moved back to Kaleva to care for his aging mother and mull over how to put his career back on track. Calvin Lutz, a childhood friend and the owner of Lutz Farm, asked him if he would be interested in helping out part-time with managing the farm. Lutz, a third-generation farmer, raises an assortment of fruits, vegetables, and Christmas trees on 1,800 acres.

Coe had been around farming all his childhood, but he didn’t know the business from the inside. Yet he needed work and told his friend he’d try. Seven years later, he’s still managing Lutz Farm, now full-time. Since Coe started working for Lutz, the farm has prospered and he has helped it expand into new markets. One of the markets Coe is most excited about is farm-to-school.

“I was invited to a meeting about farm-to-school programs and thought this sounds interesting,” he explained. “After all, my job is trying to figure out new markets—but there were the infrastructure hurdles to overcome. About a year later, I had a distributor come to me and say, ‘We have a deal with Chicago Public Schools and they need peaches, can you fill an order?’ I loaded up a truck with peaches and sent it off to Chicago. A couple of days later, I started getting phone calls from school administrators in Chicago telling me how much the kids loved the fresh peaches. They’d never had a fresh peach before. I thought this is cool—and could be something big.”

Coe is now helping to develop farm-to-school programs in northwest Michigan and looking for investors to build a processing center on Lutz Farm so that he and other farmers in the region can supply their crops to schools throughout the year. He says that not all the infrastructure challenges have been solved yet, but he’s impressed that Michigan is emerging as a national leader in farm-to-school programs and feels confident that public officials are going to help resolve the challenges.

“There are obstacles everywhere you look in farming, and farmers figure out how to overcome them every day,” he says. One of the biggest obstacles he sees is getting local farmers to work together. “Farmers don’t usually like to share information about who they’re selling to,” he explains. In this case, though, their mutual interests in helping kids eat better and supporting local and regional economic development has united them. Coe believes that identifying these shared goals will have ripple effects in local communities, sustaining partnerships that are dedicated to a common vision of community development. His can-do attitude reflects, above all, his faith in his community.

Farm policy and rural development have been on divergent paths for decades, but Michigan may be showing the whole nation how to bring them closer together again. The policy environment is crucial: do farmers believe that government is a partner, or just another obstacle for them to overcome? In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder has said he wants to build up industries that are already strong.⁴ In agriculture, this means building new markets for farmers.

Farmers need partners at both the state and federal levels. Sen. Stabenow has said, “I’m focused on continuing to support the great men and women of our state who work so hard, day in and day out, to produce a safe and abundant food and fiber supply that powers our nation’s economy.”⁵ The Michigan senator is talking about her own state, but others stand to benefit if she is correct in her assessment; federal legislation is not written for the benefit of a single state.  “When we talk about the farm bill,” she has said, “we are really talking about a jobs bill.”⁶