By Tim Ellis
Governor Mike Dunleavy said Friday he intends to establish a state Department of Agriculture that he says would improve Alaska’s ability to feed itself. Right now, the state now imports 95 percent of its food.
Dunleavy said in a news release issued Friday that he’ll introduce an executive order to establish the new agency on Jan. 21st, the first day of the upcoming legislative session. He said the order would transfer authority and resources from the Division of Agriculture, which is part of the state Department of Natural Resources, over to the new cabinet-level department.
Delta Junction-area farmer and rancher Scott Mugrage hailed the governor’s proposal, and said it’s long past due.
“Hopefully the seat in the cabinet gives us the opportunity to have the governor's ear,” he said.
Mugrage is president of the Alaska Farm Bureau, and he says the state’s farmers and ranchers need better access to the governor’s office than it’s now getting from the under-resourced Division of Agriculture.
“There's not a big enough staff there to deal with all that's out there,” he said in an interview Sunday.
For example, he cited a statewide grain shortage two years ago caused by unseasonable weather that reduced harvest of feed grains statewide and hiked the price of grain by more than 30 percent. That forced some ranchers to get out of the business.
“We ran completely out of feed grains in the state of Alaska,” he said. “… A lot of people had sold off some of their breeding stock animals. Y’know they were just not sure where they were going to secure the grain from.”
State officials finally allocated money to transport grain by truck up from Canada and the Lower 48. But Mugrage says by then, the economic harm had been done.
“It was 6 to 8 months too late by the time it arrived,” he said. “And had we been sitting there in a cabinet position, you know, had a farmer or someone representing agriculture in the cabinet, I think we could have gotten to that months quicker.”
Last year, the state invested a million dollars to establish a grain reserve based in Delta that’ll mainly store barley to stabilize the market when harvests are poor. Mugrage said he hopes the new Agriculture Department will anticipate those problems and respond more quickly than the ag division, which is one of several agencies under the Department of Natural Resources.
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