- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDU PBS.

Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Right now in WEDU, agriculture is the second largest industry in Florida, but it's facing issues that threaten that status.

Everything from urban sprawl and new housing developments to exotic disease and climate change is proving to be a challenge to the state's farmers.

We'll take a look at the industry that employs 2 million people in the state, some of whom are undocumented with Florida's agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson next on Florida This Week.

(upbeat music) Welcome back.

It's easy for those of us who live in cities or suburbs to forget that Florida's vast interior has about 45,000 farming operations; citrus, vegetables, strawberries, cattle, eggs, lumber, and ornamental plants are all produced here.

Florida's citrus industry, once a centerpiece of the state's identity and economy has seen a staggering 90% decline in production over the past two decades caused by the rapidly spreading citrus greening disease, hurricanes and developers need for more and more land.

Florida's one of the only places in the US producing fresh fruits and vegetables in wintertime to supply the whole nation.

Roughly a third of the state's land is currently devoted to agriculture.

That's almost 10 million acres, but that number is shrinking.

A new report from 1000 Friends of Florida finds that some 20% of this land could be lost to development by the year 2070.

An additional 41,000 acres will also disappear under sea level rise.

Adding to the uncertainty is the promise from the incoming president to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

Here in Florida, it's estimated that non-citizen immigrants account for somewhere between 37 and 47% of Florida's agricultural workers.

And our guest is Florida's agriculture commissioner Wilton Simpson.

He was born in Lakeland, he now lives in Trilby, where he's an egg farmer, and he served in the legislature where he was senate president in 2021 and 2022.

In 2023 became the state's Agriculture Commissioner, which means he is also a member of the Florida Cabinet.

Commissioner Simpson, welcome to Florida this week, great to see you.

- Well, it's great to be here this morning.

- I want to ask you about egg farming.

Inflation was a big issue in the past presidential election.

- [Wilton] Sure.

- And a lot of people look at the price of eggs and say, wow, I have to pay, you know, seven, eight, nine dollars for a dozen eggs.

You're an egg farmer, why are eggs so expensive?

- Well, there's several factors, but I think the biggest factor in the last four or five years on eggs was the avian flu.

So if an egg farm or any chicken farm that gets avian flu, you have to depopulate the entire farm.

And right now, in the United States, in the country, I think we're down several, you know, 20-25 million birds from our normal production.

- Wow.

- Which creates a supply and demand issue.

And then when you couple it with the inflationary factors from the Biden administration the last four years, you get these higher prices.

And what I mean by that, the higher labor costs, the higher fuel costs, the higher packaging costs, everything that we do now costs 25 to 50% more than it just did five years ago.

And so when you think about the inflation that's been in all of agriculture, but in agri- You know, in chicken business and in the egg business also, coupled with the fact that the avian flu has taken out a lot of production, those two factors have led to higher egg prices.

- Hmm.

I've read that H5N1 avian flu has been found in Florida dairy farms.

- That's right.

- The virus has infected wild birds, backyard chickens, at least one dolphin in Florida.

So far we haven't seen any kind of passing on to humans.

How concerned are you about its spread in Florida?

- Well, we are very concerned.

And we had, there was a dairy farm in Texas probably three or four months ago that broke with avian flu, the H5N1.

And I immediately issued an emergency order as Commissioner of Agriculture to not allow any lactating milk cows to come into the state of Florida.

That was a very important step.

And several of those cows had been distributed around the country.

There are eight other states now that have the H5N1 avian flu because those cows were distributed around the country.

The USDA and the federal government about six weeks after we shut our area down, we shut ours down immediately to protect Florida farmers and consumers, and the federal government, you know, did that about six weeks later, about six weeks too late.

And I don't blame them for that that's the process they have to go through to get there, but, you know, we were very fortunate to be able to act very quickly.

We have protocols in this state as do our farming communities in the state to protect themselves from the avian flu.

And we have been very aggressive as the commissioner, I have been very aggressive, and I got a great team in Tallahassee, is very aggressive on identifying, you know, if there's a backyard flock with avian flu, we have to immediately go there, dispose of those birds and make sure that it does not get more widespread.

So we're doing all of the things that we can to protect our food chain supply.

We want the most safe, affordable, abundant food anywhere in the world.

And we're a major part of that supply chain to the United States and the rest of the world here in the state of Florida.

So we're gonna continue to protect our citizens and our agriculture to make sure that we can accomplish those things.

- Another shock to the Florida's agriculture system is what's happening to the citrus industry.

I said in the setup piece so we're down 90% in production.

Is that the number that you would agree to?

- Yeah, I would agree to that.

If you go back 20 years ago, 25 years ago, we produced 250 million boxes a year in fruit.

This year we're gonna produce about 15 million boxes.

- Is there any solution to citrus greening which is causing this downfall?

- So they're very expensive solutions.

If you go to Bartow, Dundee, Florida, right now, they've got a program called the Cup Program where you put 'em undercover.

It's very expensive, but it clearly protects them from the greening siled and other, canker, and other types of bugs.

- So they grow kind of a greenhouse or plastic greenhouse?

- That's exactly- Not plastic, but a covered greenhouse that can breathe.

That's breathable cloth.

- Yeah.

- That will allow sunlight in and allow for that tree to grow.

And so we're doing, that's growing very rapidly.

There's several thousand acres now planted in that place.

We've also spent about $10 million a year of your taxpayer money on research to develop a tree that is not susceptible to greening.

We've made very good progress, there's a tree called the Donaldson.

There's others that are showing signs in the root stocks that we're using now in our citrus industry that it could come back.

And so we're hoping that we can keep the main arteries of our citrus industry and the plants and the manufacturing facilities to make sure that there's a place to go with 'em when it does come back.

But we're hopeful that it'll come back.

I know the cup system is working in that area.

It's much smaller in acres, and obviously there's a lot more fruit now grown in those fewer acres.

And so I think that's part of the future.

And I do believe in the coming years we will have a tree that will be resistant to greening.

And I think you'll see a large swaths of citrus come back.

And what are the goals?

You know, what of my internal goals and personal goals?

You know, we went from 250 million boxes, now we're at 15 million.

If 10 years from now we're back up to 60 or 80 million boxes of fruit, I think that'd be a major success.

- There's gotta be tremendous pressure on family farmers who used to have a grove and now can't produce citrus in the way they did 20 or 25 years ago.

Pressure to sell that land or find a crop that immediately is gonna provide some income for the family.

- That's exactly right.

And in 2000 in either 15 or 16, we put into a place a law called an Agritourism Law, to where you have these vacant barns now that used to have a citrus grove or other types of agriculture there that's no more viable to these small farmers.

We want to do everything we can to protect small farmers, any farmer, but in particular small farmers.

So agritourism has allowed these farmers to have revenue from having events at their facilities.

Weddings, Christmas parties, FFA4H events, things of that nature.

So we're very pleased, really with an industry and agritourism that amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in this state this year that only really have existed the last seven or eight years.

- When you drive from Tampa to Orlando and you take some of the back roads that used to be lined by citrus groves, now they're lined by housing developments.

So there's tremendous pressure, I think, on family farmers to sell out to the developers.

- There are, and we have programs that we're trying to combat that with, but right, the small family farmer can no longer afford to hold a land that's selling for 50, 60, 70, 80, a hundred thousand dollars an acre to grow crops on that are in most of the time failing, especially in the citrus industry.

So, you know, those are areas that are gonna develop where you have these main arterial roads.

If you've got an I4, an I75 meeting, you're gonna have a lot of growth there.

But we have a tremendous amount of agriculture in the spine of this state, and we're very proud of that.

And again, second leading driver of the economy, over 2 million people went to work today in agriculture.

And we are right now, today, it's wintertime, we are supplying over 70% of the fresh vegetables in this entire eastern seaboard of the United States right here from Florida.

- That's a big number.

You're quoted saying that agriculture is a national security issue.

We need to protect this area of the state, not only for agriculture, but for the aquifer recharge and for the animals of our state.

You're a big fan of the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program and the Wildlife Corridor.

But why do you think it's a national security issue?

- Because without food, I compare it to oil crises, right?

We've spent trillions of dollars making sure that we have a strategic supply of oil in this country that would last us at least six months.

What would happen in your food supply if there were just seven days of no groceries in the grocery store, right?

People would be panicking in this country and in a month would be starving to death.

So you have to protect agriculture at all costs.

You cannot survive without food and water, clean, fresh water.

Which as senate president, you know, some of the things you just mentioned there, the wildlife corridor, that was one of my main priorities to put in the statute.

What is the wildlife corridor?

It's about 17, 18 million acres of land that we have to protect for the betterment of this state and the future of this state.

The aquifer gets recharged in that area, animals traverse the state, and it's where we grow your food substantially.

So the Rural and Family Lands Protection Act, again, as senate president, I put $300 million in the budget.

And that program, when I became Commissioner of Agriculture and two years ago, had 65,000 acres in it, today we have nearly 200,000 acres.

So I've taken those dollars, and what we do differently is we buy development rights from farmers.

We do not buy the land, we buy development rights.

And then we require farmers to use best management practices to maintain and take care of that land.

But it's their land, they pay taxes on it, they grow their crops on it, they grow their agriculture on it, and they provide the food and fiber we need to survive as a nation.

And again, it is the most safe, affordable, abundant food anywhere in the world.

And something that we've done in addition to that which we're very proud of, is Fresh from Florida.

We've really enhanced Fresh from Florida the last two years.

We went from three or 400,000 followers to well over a million in just two years.

- These are the stickers you see in the grocery store.

- That's exactly right, when you see that Fresh from Florida sticker, you know that food was grown here in Florida.

When you buy that fruit or that vegetable or that product, that beef that's fresh from Florida, not only are you supporting your Florida farmers, you're supporting the green space that they provide.

- Yeah.

- The vast majority of green space in this state is provided by farmers.

- I hear people though, complain in Sarasota, the celery fields that used to be out there on the west side, or I'm sorry, the east side of the county in Sarasota taken over by developers, people say it's not right for development because it's gonna flood too easily in a major hurricane.

Do developers have too much power here in the state of Florida?

- No, I don't think they have too much power.

I think we are a capitalist society.

I think we have constitutional rights to do things, and I think we value property rights in the state.

Now the question is, is what do we do as a state to help combat the ideal of this land being converted from agriculture into to housing?

Because agriculture has a lot of enemies in this state that, you know, the net 2050s and the net 2035s believe you gotta eliminate 30 to 40% of your agriculture to get to net zero, right?

Now, I've told them many times I've said, well, okay, let's just assume you do that.

Who's gonna starve to death in this world?

There's gonna be another billion people on this planet in the next 20, 25 years, who's gonna feed 'em?

And, you know, it's like the fake meat issue, right?

We banned fake meat, we're the first state in the union to ban fake meat.

It's something we pushed last year.

A synthetic meat.

You wanna receive a biomass, you grow it in a Petri dish, you run it through your 3D printer, and in whatever that prints out you eat?

And you know, we're gonna stay with our supply chain and our cattle industry and our beef products that we have here.

And it's not only about protecting our beef industry and our supply chain, which is a big deal, but we have to protect our consumers.

You know, the USDA and FDA give provisional okays to go ahead with some of these experimental processes.

And within the last 10 years, we've had 10,000 of those provisional go aheads stricken down because they've discovered their health defects for human population or animal population.

So we're not gonna allow Florida to go into a place where we destroy our supply chain, destroy agriculture for this futuristic product so that we can call ourself net zero.

- But, you know, when you talk about net zero, I've heard some farmers say farm can be an asset to carbon sequestering.

And then if you do the farm right, that you can capture carbon.

- Amen.

Using cover crop, our forest that we plant around this state and things of that nature.

In the ocean, we can, you know, we capture a lot of grasses that we're growing on the bottom of the ocean, that we're gonna be replanting.

We are planning 'em, we've done major projects.

All of that sequester carbon.

The challenge is, is at the federal level, they put rules in place that says, oh, this has to be sustainable for 30 years or a hundred years.

Or you can't get the carbon credits that you're deserving.

Well, if you plant pine trees today in a field in 20 to 30 years, you're gonna harvest them.

And you know what?

Then you're gonna replant 'em.

And those trees are sequestering carbon.

What we have to have is we have to have a federal government, which we do not have, that has common sense that will put that carbon capturing sequestering abilities of farmers to work like the cover crops, like the work we do with our oceans and the planting of grasses, and we do with our forest products.

- Do you think global warming is a problem?

I said in the setup piece that we're gonna lose 41,000 acres of Florida farmland between now and 2070 due to sea level rise.

Global warming, is global warming a problem?

- Well, if you take a look at the sea level rise issue, when I was president of the Senate and Chris Sprouse was speaker of the house, this was a major issue to him.

He was from Pinellas County.

We put $500 million in a trust fund to combat sea level rise and interior flooding in the state.

In addition to that, we put another $125 million in the budget of recurring revenue to go there to help these communities, like The Keys and the coastal areas of the state, to make sure that we were prepared for the sea level rise.

I don't believe that our federal government, our science has been honest with us.

I think during COVID there was a lot of dishonesty.

And I think there's a lot of dishonesty in the effects of, in what happens over centuries with our environment.

And so do I believe that the temperature has warmed over the last 20 years?

Well, we can look at it, the monitor and say, yes.

Do I believe that that means that we are doing something irreparable to this world that's gonna cause it to continue to rise for the next 200 years?

No, I don't think we have the science to back that up.

And so I think that we're taking a small block of time and we're politicizing it in a way that creates major disruptions in our economy.

Just like the ideal that we are now using EVs, and the federal government's incentivizing EVs, when we should be incentivizing natural gas since we have a- It's safe, affordable, and abundant and we've supplied in this country.

We have a 300 year supply of natural gas in this country.

So we're trying to skip over and it, by the way, it burns 50% cleaner than oils and diesels and things of that nature.

So think about going to that product, which we have in Florida, about 65% of our electricity is generated today on natural gas.

It's the reason we do not have these zones in Florida that are labeled by the EPA as pollution zones.

If you go back 30 years ago, 60% of our electricity was generated by coal.

So we've converted, Florida has done its part to eliminate emissions.

We've done a lot of things that I can describe here, but we've done a lot of things to be more common sense, I would say, using the energy supplies we have.

And if we lean in on what we have, and I believe President Trump will do that, the common administration, and he is got a legislature that should do these things, it will be back with common sense with energy policy, with growth policy, and we will be doing the things that will make us a more prosperous nation.

- The studies that say that sea level rise will result in maybe a three-foot increase in sea levels around Florida over the next half century or 75 years, do you think they're false?

- Mostly false, I do.

And why do I think that is go back and look at the studies we did in 1990 that said it was gonna be a two-foot higher than it is today, or a foot higher than it is today.

Those things have not come true.

Now do I believe that sea level rise is happening?

Well, we can see that it's happening, right?

We can measure it, but I think when you go out and then you politicize it and say it's gonna be three feet in the next 40 years, that's not, that has not been- That's not been determined, right?

And they're doing that, people that are really pushing those narratives are doing it to affect trillions of dollars being spent over the next 50 years that generally benefits their narrative.

Right?

- Let me ask you about undocumented immigrants.

Incoming President Trump says he wants to deport millions of undocumented people.

Let me play for you what one Florida farmer Manatee County says about tougher Florida laws on immigrant workers.

The need for more workers, including the undocumented.

- I understand the idea that at a state level, you're gonna politically go ahead and send a message to Washington.

In the meantime, crops are gonna rot, crops won't be planted, farmers will suffer.

Florida cannot continue to produce the food that it has historically produced with the labor that's available either domestically or through the H2A program.

Before long, if we keep going down this path, there won't be a tomato, there won't be a bell pepper, there won't be a cucumber, a grapefruit, or an orange that's grown in the United States because it'll all be imported.

- What do you think of that?

- Well, I think he is taking a very short view of it.

As Senate president, I was very proud to, you know, to pass laws that said we are not a sanctuary state.

We passed laws that toughen the verification of people that work in the state.

And the reality of it is, is that the federal government has made the H2A program so unbearable that it's hard for small farmers, not large farmers, large farmers can get all the H2A labor they want, but the smaller farmers struggle with it.

What I believe is the federal government in January, after January 21st, should put a program in place, an H2A program that farmers have access to.

There are plenty of workers around this world that want to come to the United States seasonally and do this type of work, and they make 10, 20 times more money than they make in their own country.

And they take those dollars back and they support their families, and I agree with that.

- President Trump is saying when he's in office, he's gonna deport maybe 12 million people.

There's hundreds of thousands of people who are undocumented that work in Florida agriculture.

How is that gonna affect Florida agriculture?

- Here's what I believe.

I believe that President Trump is going to do exactly what he said.

I believe that he's gonna start with the criminals, he's gonna start- We're going to try to locate all of the criminals, all of the terrorists.

I mean, look at what just happened in Louisiana.

And I know that was an American, but how many of these networks are now in this country because Biden led in 10 million illegals?

We have to have a border on this country, and you can do, by the way, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

We can deport illegals that are in this state and in this country, and we can have a much stronger H2A program to replace that labor.

And if I were advising President Trump and I consider him a good friend, I would say, Mr. President, we need to make sure that our H2A laws line up with our demands and needs, and we need to deport the criminals clearly in this country.

- So last year there was a chance to pass immigration reform law in Washington.

They didn't pass it.

I mean, isn't that what we need, is some sort of immigration reform law and not wholesale deportation of 12 million people?

- Well, I believe there are ways to go about that.

And of course, if you look at the state of Florida, we don't have these kind of problems, right?

We've got a balanced budget, we've have surpluses.

We protect our environment here, we do all the things we should do.

Washington hasn't really done a whole lot of things, and especially in the last four years.

When President Trump was there before we got large tax cuts, we had a great economy.

We had a lot of- We were protected on our border.

And I think that if you use common sense, and I am hopeful coming into this new year with this new legislature coming, that common sense will reign, right?

They will protect us at the border.

They will deport criminals that have come into this country.

They will have an H2A program that protects agriculture.

We won't allow boys to play in girls sports at a federal level.

We passed that bill when I was senate president here in state.

We will do a lot of things that are common sense.

And you know what?

We can do all of that at a federal level with the current Congress in the first 90 days.

They always talk about the first a hundred days.

Well, let's do that in the first a hundred days.

Let's do those five or six things and this country will be much safer and much better off for it.

- As you know, your name has come up a lot when people talk about the next gubernatorial election here in Florida.

Are you running for governor?

- Yeah.

You know, I've got a great job as Commissioner of Agriculture.

I've tried to do my job very well.

I've worked very hard at it.

I'm gonna continue to work to be the best Agriculture Commissioner I can be.

And we'll let the next year or so go by and we'll take a look at it, but it's not something that I wake up any day thinking, "I've gotta be the next governor."

But, you know, if that happens, I certainly love to serve, but I'm going to remain the agriculture commissioner and I'm gonna remain doing my job.

- Sounds like you're very close to President Trump.

- He's been a very good friend for many years.

And if you'll remember, he endorsed me several months before I got into the Commissioner of Agriculture race.

And he called me, he's a very gracious man, and a lot of the ways that the national media portrays him is just completely false.

And I see him as a very warm person, as a caring person and very personable person.

And I think when we saw him at the convention with his grandkids, that's the Donald Trump that I know, and he's a good man, and I think he's gonna do a good job for this country.

- Recently we had two politicians pass away.

Buddy McKay, who was for a short time the governor of the state of Florida, former congressman, Lieutenant Governor under under Lawton Chiles.

He passed away, he was from Ocala.

Jimmy Carter was from America's Georgia, passed away recently.

Small town people who made a big splash in politics.

What do you think of their passing?

- Well, you know, I think that, you know, Jimmy Carter was...

When you think about his presidential time, you know, the first president I could ever vote for was President Reagan in 1984 when I turned 18, and I remember the Carter Reagan debates, and philosophically I was geometrically opposed about everything that Jimmy Carter said.

But once he left the presidency and he became a very philanthropic person, and he taught Sunday school classes, he was a big part of Habitat for Humanity for years, which I admire that organization, Habitat for Humanity.

I was the chairman of our local Habitat for Humanity.

So I think Jimmy Carter had a lasting legacy after he was president.

Since we're not gonna say anything bad about the deceased, we're not gonna talk about his presidency.

And I think Buddy McKay, I didn't know Buddy McKay, I don't think I'd ever really met Buddy McKay.

But, you know, he was in an era where, you know, Democrats in those days, you had a lot of blue dog Democrats in this state.

And I think he would've considered himself, you know, a blue dog, traditional Democrat from a small community.

And I think that was the appeal that, you know, I think it was Governor Charles.

- [Rob] Yeah.

- That he was the lieutenant governor for.

And I was working on an egg farm when he was the governor.

I didn't pay much attention back then to who the governor was.

But, you know, clearly he had strong local roots and community roots and says a lot about a person.

- Commissioner Wilton Simpson, thanks a lot for coming on the program.

- Thank you for having me.

- All right.

Stay tuned because right after this program, we're airing an interview I did with former president Jimmy Carter.

Former president passed away peacefully on December 29th at the age of a hundred.

Back in 2003, I interviewed him when he was on a book tour in Sarasota.

We spoke about his then new book on the Revolutionary War, his hopes for Middle East Peace and his advice to a presidential hopeful at the time on how to appeal to Southern voters.

Well, that's it for us this week.

If you have comments about the program, please send them to ftw@wedu.org.

Our show is now available as a podcast.

And from all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend.

(upbeat music)