Precision agriculture is the path to a healthier and more accessible food supply

Sustainable food quality and security is critical. Precision agriculture is the way for America to not just have food security but a more healthy and accessible food supply. Good government is that which enables a free-market economy to work for its citizens.

As it stands today, American agriculture is subsidized only to be exploited by foreign corporations, and if America’s food imports were stopped, one-fifth of our population would starve. This is an insane irony in a nation with such rich agricultural land and infrastructure.

Twenty percent and growing of America’s food supply is imported. This is a path Americans must not continue to travel. In Northwest New Jersey, we’ve lost many of our farms and food-processing businesses because of high taxes, high labor costs, and a disenfranchised retail market. The cost of labor measured against the price of food products is the root cause of why we import, and precision agriculture is the catalyst that makes it possible for our agricultural industry to be profitable and supply America with local, quality food.

Once, America’s countryside was filled with small, independent, and profitable farms that nourished local towns and cities. Today, a local farmer can barely survive with the costs to produce a gallon of milk, a pound of beef, or a box of vegetables, as foreign imports can be imported en masse at less of a cost to the consumer.

Precision agriculture provides the infrastructure to resurrect these farms where a single farmer can use technology to produce and market what took dozens of people to do, dozens of people who no longer are on the labor market as the farmers can’t afford to pay them as they are out bid by the low cost of foreign imports. This should be a bipartisan effort with the USDA as the lead, increasing provisions in state farm subsidies for a planned and regulated implementation of precision agriculture based on states’ agricultural priorities.

What is critical is each state agriculture agency hire an individual program manager to oversee the analysis, hiring of vendors and implementation in order to mitigate the chaotic dynamic of so many different vendors and niche-providers. One program manager will maximize efficiencies while mitigating overlaps and be accountable for success or failure. All civic leaders must make this issue an imperative. Not only does this concern agriculture, but simultaneously conservation, soil and environment can be observed and managed as second- and third-order effects of a precision agriculture infrastructure.

Joseph Labarbera, Vice Chair of Communications

Sussex NJ GOP