How the Agricultural Commissioner impacts the business community

Thanks for joining us this morning. Two weeks ago, we ran the first in a series of pieces examining Council of State races that don’t attract much attention but that nevertheless impact the business community. Today, we’re discussing the Agriculture Commissioner. What does the commissioner actually do, why does it matter to the business community, and who’s running?

We’ll get right to it.

***
We suspect many North Carolinians know the first half of the name of the department over which the Agriculture Commissioner wields authority – Department of Agriculture – but not the second half: and Consumer Services.

The Commissioner’s remit extends far beyond promoting the state’s agriculture industry, maintaining agriculture statistics, and offering technical assistance to food producers. The Commissioner enforces gasoline quality standards, tests food products like poultry and fruit, and even inspects scales at grocery stores that weigh products sold by the pound. This list is hardly exhaustive (see for yourself). Suffice to say, the Commissioner holds sweeping, if under the radar, authority over many of the daily transactions that power the state.

Beyond that, the agriculture and agribusiness industry itself has tremendous impacts on North Carolina’s economy. In last year’s annual agriculture impact report, titled “North Carolina’s Number One Industry,” N.C. State economist Mike Walden calculated the sector (including food, forest, and fiber) accounts for nearly 16% of the state’s economic output and 16% of the state’s workforce.

It’s for these reasons – agriculture’s dominant impact on the state’s economy and the department’s broad regulatory reach – the business community has an interest in a competent, even-handed commissioner. A fair regulator appropriately balances safety and the importance of following the rules with factors like reasonableness, accounting both for the public interest and a business’s efforts to comply with complicated regulations.

But it’s not hard to imagine a commissioner leveraging the department’s broad reach to manufacture controversies. Grocery store scales off by a fraction of an ounce, say, or food test results that are unusual but not yet conclusive, or gasoline dispensers that require minor readjusting – these issues would be ripe for out-of-context media amplification and even fear-mongering.

One might ask why an officeholder would do something like that, and the answer is limited only by the bounds of imagination. A media scare alleging unscrupulous businesses fleece consumers can generate name ID for an otherwise sleepy post. Regulators can target particular industries or companies with unfair zeal in pursuit of political objectives. A miniature example of something like this played out in 2017, some say, when former Auditor Beth Wood called into the question the safety of the state’s milk supply – unfairly, it seems.

***
Who is running for the job? Steve Troxler, a Republican, has been Commissioner of Agriculture since 2005 and this year seeks his sixth term in office. (He is not the state’s longest-serving Commissioner of Agriculture, as James Allen Graham held the job from 1964 to 2001.) Troxler is generally one of the state’s highest vote-getters, regularly winning reelection by generous margins. Notwithstanding the matter involving Beth Wood and the milk supply, his tenure has not seen any meaningful scandal.

Dr. Sarah Taber, a Democrat, will face Troxler in November. Similar to Jeff Jackson, Taber has a prolific social media presence. She boasts more than 100,000 followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and posts to her accounts multiple times per day.

Taber has a well-crafted campaign brand touting “countryside” nostalgia. She combines that brand with a platform that suggests North Carolina replace corn, soy, and tobacco crops with carrots, berries, and tree nuts; focus subsidies on black and marginalized farmers; and encourage farms to adopt cooperative or similar ownership structures.

Taber’s campaign  is reminiscent of that of former Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, who at age 40 became the state’s first woman elected to the position and the only Democrat to win statewide that year. Fried has been actively helping Taber’s campaign.

In sum, the Agriculture Commissioner has substantial impact on North Carolina’s business community. Agriculture and agribusiness is responsible for almost 16% of the state’s economic output. Beyond that, the commissioner has little-known but no less impactful authority over tenets of the economy with which millions of North Carolinians interact daily. 

An under the radar seat that has incredibly large responsibility.