From the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/30agnj.html?...

Farmers Fear Agriculture Dept.’s Abolition
By IVER PETERSON
Published: March 30, 2008
ALLENTOWN

NEW JERSEY’S nickname notwithstanding, the Garden State’s farmers amount to just one half of one percent of the total workforce, and rank far below the next largest group, which is furniture makers, according to federal employment figures. So there is a certain political logic to Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s decision to save $500,000 toward his budget-balancing plan by abolishing the State Department of Agriculture, and the cabinet position that goes with it.

Not surprisingly, the farmers that remain in the state are protesting this loss of prestige and of representation in the corridors of power in Trenton. But they are not using the normal language of power in New Jersey, the language used by the teachers or the developers or the trucking companies, who all have plenty of members and muscle to choke the halls of the State House at critical moments. No, the farmers are complaining that they deserve to keep their place at the governor’s table precisely because they are so few and politically so weak.

“Farmers are historically underrepresented in terms of what they return to the state in food supply and income and rural amenities,” said Peter J. Furey, executive director of the New Jersey Farm Bureau, the state agriculture sector’s lobbying arm. “Now they’re going to gut out our cabinet position, and I can’t tell you how important that position has been for farmers over the years, to make up for their political underrepresentation in Trenton.”

New Jersey’s school year and even the Legislature’s calendar may still be set to free students and legislators for summer work in the fields, but these days, the state is more likely to tick in synchronization with the financial markets in London or the commuting habits of millions of office workers along the I-278 office corridor. The last true farmer to sit in the Legislature, C. William Haines, died in 1996, and there does not seem to be any prospect for farmers to elect one of their own any time soon.

“We need a voice in the government because the percentage of farmers is so small,” said Roger Gravatt, who raises hay and straw on several hundred acres in Allentown for New Jersey’s big horse industry. “As far as getting a politician elected to help us, the farmer’s vote is nil.”

There are about 3,000 full-time farmers working about 800,000 acres, or 17 percent of the state’s land area, according to state figures. Even during the farm depressions that struck in the late 19th century, according to a Rutgers University study, there were more than 33,000 farmers in the state, working 2.6 million acres, amounting to more than half of the state’s land.

If New Jersey were to reinvent itself from scratch today, David Rouseau, the state treasurer, asked while testifying before the Legislature recently, would it even consider including a department of agriculture? Probably not, he said.

However few they may be, New Jersey’s farmers produce goods worth nearly a billion dollars in sales each year. But their principal crops suggest that farming has already become a factor in the forces of growth and sprawl that are the enemies of open space. The state’s biggest agricultural commodity, representing 42 percent of total sales in 2006, are greenhouse and nursery plantings destined to adorn the subdivisions and office parks that have grown where farmers once plowed. (Horses are the second most valuable farm commodity, with blueberries third, peaches fourth and green peppers fifth.)

Agriculture Secretary Charles M. Kuperus, whom Governor Corzine would put out of work, is a nurseryman.

The governor also wants to eliminate the departments of commerce and personnel, although that idea has not yet produced any loud constituent complaints from businesses or from state personnel. But Mr. Corzine is promising the farmers that he will not forget them, said Lilo H. Stainton, his press secretary.

“The budget process we’re facing is a very, very tough one — $2.7 billion in cuts was not easy to make,” Ms. Stainton said, referring to the governor’s efforts to close New Jersey’s budget gap. “The primary, underlying goal was to have government take the pain, and not people, and the thinking was to eliminate any kind of duplication in state government, or any overlap. Clearly the Agriculture Department performed a lot of important functions, but those functions are not necessarily going to be lost — they are going to be, essentially, reshuffled a little bit.”

ALTHOUGH the final assignments have not been made, a defunct Agriculture Department’s various jobs in inspections, regulations and trade promotions would be taken over by other state agencies, Ms. Stainton said.

“The functions that agriculture personnel perform — protecting open space, animal husbandry and so on — are already spread across several departments, so the important roles that they perform are already represented in the state,” she went on. “They may not have a cabinet person wearing that hat, but they will have a broad influence through the government.”

The farmers insist that the hat is important, whatever the governor’s assurances of future influence. When a dairy wholesaler went bankrupt not long ago, it took the muscle of the Department of Agriculture to make the company pay out its performance bond, said Bob Freiberger, a grain and hay farmer who is Mr. Gravatt’s neighbor in Allentown.

When farmers feared a proposed state regulation would shift power over water allocation from farmers to developers, the department made the case in the Legislature and derailed the plan, Mr. Furey said. And when farmers worried not long ago that a proposal to give animal welfare inspectors broader powers to supervise the care of domestic animals might expose farms to raids by even private animal rights groups, intervention by the department kept those enforcement powers in the hands of state animal welfare inspectors, Mr. Furey said.

“Normally, we can work out our case,” he said. “We just need to get in front of somebody — somebody who already has the expertise and experience to deal with us.”

Losing a voice in the governor’s inner circle is not the only concern the farmers have expressed. The prospect of having the department’s advocacy, licensing and inspection functions dispersed among several remaining departments also bothers them. Especially if, as it seems likely, some of the Agriculture Department’s regulatory powers are assigned to the Department of Environmental Protection. A group of farmers waiting out the spring rain in Mr. Freiberger’s office shook their heads collectively at that prospect.

“The D.E.P. is not our friend,” said Martin Bullock, a farmer in Cream Ridge, as if saying it said it all. The men blame the D.E.P. for New Jersey’s failure to attract an ethanol plant — and the federal subsidies that would have accompanied ethanol production — despite several years of trying, and they fear that a department better known for enforcement than advocacy will only make the licensing and regulatory parts of their jobs harder.

The New Jersey Farm Bureau is organizing a protest demonstration at the capital on April 1, hoping to use tractors in the streets to make up for what the farmers lack in sheer numbers. And they will continue to appeal to the Legislature and the public on the one issue that nearly always moves New Jerseyans to action — the protection of open space. The farmers will argue that the nearly 140,000 acres already protected against development may be endangered if the Department of Agriculture, guardian of the state’s Farmland Preservation Program, is not there to keep rural views open and the builders at bay.

“That’s one thing people like us for,” said Mr. Bullock, who grows nursery stock, Christmas trees and other crops. “They like to live where there’s a farmhouse at the end of the road.”