County growth plan must protect farming

As a lifelong resident of Whatcom County, I recognize I might be biased, but isn’t this a great place to live? Great weather, the mountains, the ocean — no wonder so many people are moving here! They may be surprised to find, though, in a few short years, some of the most important reasons for moving here may be on their way out forever.

Whatcom County now has four times more people than when I grew up here in the 1970s, and it’s certainly starting to show. More traffic, more houses and more neighbors complaining about slow-moving farm equipment, noises and smells. All these extra people create problems for our farms.

And how does this growth get managed? Every 10 years, all cities and counties in the state are required to update their Comprehensive (or “Comp”) Plan. This document provides a template for how these entities handle growth. This process is happening over the next two years.

For Whatcom County, with its rapidly growing population and limited land resources, planning growth is no small task. For farming, it requires active participation. In many meetings, I’m asked about what farmers need to survive and thrive in the next 10 years. Given all the other factors affecting farming — markets, economics, weather — that question alone has no easy answer. It’s quite clear our greater community values our farms and our unique rural identity, but how far does that value go?

Whatcom County has shown interest in protecting agriculture. Over the last 20 years, it’s made an effort to provide some protection. Unfortunately, those measures have done little to stem the tide of the erosion of both farmland and the economic base farms need to sustain themselves.

Increasingly, I hear from farmers about how other factors are affecting farms’ profitability. High land prices, often driven by the astronomical value of agricultural land just across the border in Canada, are a huge limiting factor. The exorbitant cost of labor, driven in part by changes to overtime exemptions agriculture used to have, is having a huge effect on already tiny profit margins.

These high costs also affect our farming infrastructure. Recently, Cargill closed its feed mill in Ferndale. The cost of upgrading and renovating the facility was too high in such an uncertain economic climate, so they chose to close the doors. This leaves us with only one remaining local feed mill, when there were four back in the 1990s.

Many other examples exist of changes, closures and consolidations that leave our farms with fewer and fewer options for buying their inputs and selling their products. Thankfully our small farms fill a much-needed niche by serving our farmers markets. However, these markets are only a small portion of the overall agriculture identity here in Whatcom.

Looming over all of agriculture as a new threat is the ongoing water rights adjudication. This lawsuit forces all farmers (and all other water users as well) to file to protect their water rights. The more we learn, the more we see how complicated the process will be. There is some high-quality land that doesn’t have water rights, and some lower-quality land that does, with no clear way to address those inequities. Smaller farms have become especially disheartened by the needed technical and legal expenses they face.

Recently our farming groups have been working to educate our farmers on what their individual water rights are, both through community meetings and individual sessions with experts. I wish I could say these sessions are encouraging, but with all the other factors already weighing on farmers, what I often see, especially from the smaller farms, is discouragement and resignation.

This is a crucial time to be engaged in discussions surrounding these critical questions. History shows that in places where an agricultural base isn’t protected, the farming infrastructure is lost, and with it the entire agricultural community. If salmon recovery has any hope of success, it will be with the green open space that agriculture preserves, not pavement that generates polluted stormwater. Certainly not all of these issues are local, but there are things that can be done that would provide some hope.

Every additional requirement is one more financial and emotional burden. We need leaders who will listen and take action. At the top of the list is water security. The water rights adjudication creates immediate stress. There are opportunities, especially in a community as rich in water resources as we are, to create solutions to alleviate that stress. Instead, our leaders have run away from discussing these solutions, preferring to allow the courts to fight it out. While attorneys’ pockets get lined, more and more farmers are considering calling it quits.

Fifty years ago another area faced the same crisis. Now the Kent Valley in King County only has 1,000 acres of farmland left, the rest of it, some of the best farmland around, is all parking lots and pavement. If we don’t become more intentional about protecting the infrastructure and the farming community we still have, Whatcom County may not be far away from becoming the next Kent Valley.

Fred Likkel is executive director of Whatcom Family Farmers, a Lynden-based nonprofit organization working to secure the legacy and future of family farming.