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Economics
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Providing Adequate Infrastructure
Here are the major obstacles that stand in the way of ensuring adequate infrastructure for agriculture:
All of the infrastructure necessary for agriculture needs to be improved, including:
research
water management
roads
airports
rail lines
ports
security
quarantines on imported food and plant material to prevent spread of diseases and pests
Labor issues need attention,
including supply, housing, transportation, schooling, immigration and social services.
Worker rights need more attention. Some agricultural operations receive high marks in this area from labor groups; others receive low marks. Labor groups complain that some operations see workers as expendable, hire illegal immigrants because they will work for less and won't complain about hazardous conditions or a lack of benefits, and will not cooperate with labor groups to improve worker conditions, benefits or provide for housing and schooling. Other operations are commended for paying minimum wage (or more), offering modest health insurance benefits, ensuring safe working conditions and striving to keep people from year to year so they don't have to retrain new people each year.
Adequate farm worker housing is a growing need. Some agricultural operations provide worker housing, or pool resources with other operations to provide housing, but it is becoming less and less common for owners and operators to do so. Instead, farm workers often are forced to seek housing on their own, staying in inexpensive apartments and houses with five or six – or more – people crowded into a room. Part of the issue is money. In today's global economy, agricultural producers must find ways of reducing their labor costs. They cannot afford to construct and maintain housing if this cost cannot be passed on to consumers. They also are at a competitive disadvantage with foreign growers in the wages that are paid to workers, so are reluctant to increase these wages to help workers afford better housing in local real estate markets. Local zoning laws and construction codes also provide obstacles, and have made it prohibitively expensive for producers to expand the stock of worker housing or construct new housing. Economical housing solutions – such as manufactured and prefabricated housing – often are not allowed, and the densities required to provide worker housing on an economical and practical basis – 30 or 40 units per acre – often are prohibited by local zoning laws and land use regulations.
Too much of the research being conducted at the university level is driven by grant opportunities, rather than producer needs.
Frank Williamson, Jr. says: "Development of non-chemical pest control, bio-engineering for production and drought resistance, better no-till and multi-crop systems, and environmental interfaces all are crying for research and development." & (Note: this obstacle is addressed under Priority Actions 1-B, 3-B and 3-C in Section 1 and under Priority Action 1-J in Section 2.)
Roads are designed and built without adequate consideration for the needs of agricultural operations, such as tractor lanes, safe ingress and egress from fields, wide turning radius of trucks, secure overnight parking areas where truck refrigeration units can be allowed to run, and constant heavy load traffic on rural roads.
Rural road maintenance receives a low priority; rural counties do not always have the funds to adequately maintain rural roads and bridges. Poor rural road maintenance results in more wear and tear on trucks, which increases maintenance costs and can increase the costs of transportation for growers.
Road planning sometimes does not look at rural areas as rural. Road planners figure that, someday, they'll develop. And they plan accordingly.
"One of the concerns about infrastructure is that as Florida agriculture goes through transitions its infrastructure also transitions. Several examples:
"Cattlemen have lost cull cow slaughter facilities in Florida. This loss was due to a lack of profitability for those slaughter facilities. This could have been because of regulatory costs, low plant efficiency, like quality imported meat or any number of other issues. "State Farmers Markets were developed 50 years ago and became an infrastructure center. In fact, the basic infrastructure developed and grew outside of the state facility as the industry grew. As that industry transitions because of trade markets or weather the infrastructure transitions also. As a farming industry is reduced, there is a critical mass needed to maintain that infrastructure. Our role is to maintain the critical mass because once we lose an industry and its infrastructure, it will not come back. "A basic rule of thumb is that as technology migrates, the local infrastructure deteriorates." Agriculture faces heavy competition for land and water
with urban and environmental land uses.
Water management policies will play a key role in survival of the agricultural industry. Current problems include short permit durations that do not fit well with the needs of agriculture and flood control policies during large storm events that sometimes prevent water from being pumped from fields and groves quickly enough to prevent crop damage and loss.
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