Discussing the New Office of Rural Development with Gary McDowell

David Haynes sits down once again with Gary McDowell, former U.P. legislator, U.P. resident, and current director of the Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development (MDARD).

In this episode, Gary discusses the newly-created Office of Rural Development, which was established this past January by Governor Gretchen Whitmer via Executive Directive 2022-01 and is organized within MDARD.

The Office of Rural Development’s responsibilities include collaborating with stakeholders on rural economic development, collaborating to facilitate rural affordable housing development, collaborating to facilitate expansion of high-speed internet in rural communities, and address ramifications of population and demographic trends in rural Michigan, among other duties.

You can learn more about the Office of Rural Development at https://www.michigan.gov/mdard/about/divisions/mdard-executive-office/office-of-rural-development.

Transcript

David Haynes:

Good day, everybody. Welcome to Rural Insights Podcast. And today I’m back on with a very good friend of mine for a long, long time. And he is sitting in his home in Rudyard, Michigan. And for those of you who aren’t from the Upper Peninsula that is in the Upper Peninsula and he is usually in Lansing as you all know, as the Director of the State Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, I think, is that the correct title, Gary? Did I get that correct?

Gary McDowell:

Actually, it’s Rural Development.

David Haynes:

Rural Development, not rural affairs. And so welcome Gary, thanks for joining us on this. Gary and I were just talking before the show that all of us that live in probably, rural, up north rural and in the UP are sitting back waiting for the mother’s day snowstorm that happened in May so we can move on to spring. Hopefully. So, Gary, thank you very much. You’ve had some really exciting news. We had talked at a previous podcast that you were going to start a office for rural development. I’m going to get these titles wrong. And we had been writing for a good year and a half about the need for a rural ombudsman or a rural czar. And you’ve done that. You are the rural czar for rural America, but why don’t you tell us about what you did and how people could take advantage of it?

Gary McDowell:

Well, thank you so much, David, for this opportunity. And I want to let you know, before you go any further, that how much I enjoy your newsletter.

David Haynes:

Thank you.

Gary McDowell:

Real insights. I look forward to it every week and I pass it around the office too. So I’m not the only one in MDARD who has the opportunity to see it. And I get a lot of good comments back. But what you’re referring to is the office of real development for Michigan. And like you were saying. This concept has been around for quite a while. It was actually started by Lake Superior Partners and Alliance, and they were promoting it. Then the Grand Rapids Greater Chamber got on board. And it’s just come from the need to have a voice that represents just rural Michigan. And of course, we’re looking at the Upper Peninsula and the rest of rural Michigan. And so many times in the past and has just accelerated is we get left behind a lot of times and just statistics show it.

We have some of the highest poverty rates, lowest education numbers, just opportunities for our children. And the governor decided that after coming out of the pandemic, it was time to actually do this. It’s been around for a long time, other administrations, but put it forward. And last, it’ll be the 1st of January, first executive order of this year, she created the office of Rural Development is housed in MDARD and this real developer is a division within MDARD. She’s a deputy. And we did hire her a couple weeks ago and I’m just really just so excited who we were able to hire for this job. She’s just the perfect person for it. I know a lot of people in Marquette, the Upper Peninsula and the Grand Traverse area have worked with her for years and years. And were just as excited as we are.

We have a Sarah Lucas. She was the, up till recently, the executive director of Lake Superior Business Partners. And now she’s with MDARD. She started April 18th and we just had a meeting this morning and she was telling us already of all the connections she’s already made and meetings she’s got set up and putting together her strategic plan. And we’re just excited. This can be about this. Of course, she’s going to be looking at housing, infrastructure, economic workforce development, wastewater, and a lot of it’s the challenges of our supply system too. And so much of this goes out of the pandemic, is growing out of the pandemic.

We’ve seen so many needs that were spotlighted during the pandemic. One of the first ones that comes to mind for everybody is rural broadband. So many were working from home like myself, your spouse, your children were private to get their schooling from home. And we have approximately 40% of rural Michigan has inadequate or no broadband. So that’s one of the major challenges we’re looking at correcting. There’s going to be lots of help from the federal government at this time. So it’s just the perfect opportunity for us to have this office in place that is focusing solely on the real part of the state. So we can make sure that as Michigan’s new economy, that Governor Whitmer is working on, that the rural part of the state isn’t left out. Doesn’t matter where your zip code is. You’re going to be part of this new prosperity.

And we just had, just this morning a meeting with Sarah, she was just pointing out the different, I said the different people, different organizations that have already come forward. And going back to the pandemic, supply chain issues, labor shortages so much, just food supply. Making sure that we are food secure coming out of this. I remember back two years ago, a lot of this, how quickly we move on, but we were walking to grocery stores and seeing just empty shelf after empty shelf. And especially a lot of it was with protein, with meat. And so now we’re focusing on that. We’re focusing on more local food, sustainable food systems. Food that’s grown locally processed locally, and then of course, sold to our citizens locally. And the governor in her budget for this year, she has $30 million proposed strictly for ag development rural development for Michigan.

And a lot of it’s going to be supply chain issues, increasing processing in Michigan, especially in the animal side. And also, with Michigan, we have so many food processes. A lot of people don’t realize how many we have, because we’re just a real agricultural powerhouse here in Michigan with over 300 different commodities. So we’re looking at really looking at growing that part of our food supply system right here in Michigan. And one of the major impediments is waste water for these process. They use a lot of water. They produce a lot of waste water and most of them are in the rural part of the state. So they don’t have municipal systems they can hook up to. So it’s very costly for them. A lot of our plants have been around for years, they need upgrades. So that’s part of that $30 million.

And the other issue too, with the office of Rural Development, probably has $10 million in her budget to support Sarah’s mission and is three FTEs. But she needs that of course, to be successful. She needs those resources and they were not included in either the Senate or the House budget that just came out. The 30 million for real development and the 10 million for ag development in Michigan. So we’re concerned about that. We’re going to continue to work with our legislators and continue to educate them on the importance of this. And like I said, we can’t just go on forgetting about the rural part of the state and not having that applicant.

David Haynes:

Well, I congratulations, both you and Governor Whitmer for getting this done. If people want to reach the office and reach Sarah Lucas, do they go to your website and just look her up on the website? Isn’t that the best way?

Gary McDowell:

Yeah. That’s one way of doing it. I wish I had her email right now with me but I don’t, but yes, it’s very simple. And right now Sarah is setting up a different meeting with different groups. And I’m going to be involved in a lot of them. I guess May 11th in Traverse City, we’re having a round table there with business community ag community and in the Traverse City area. And we’re going to be up in the Upper Peninsula probably, hopefully, maybe in June, not sure we haven’t got this set up yet, but she’s going to be going around the state and talking to different organizations, different communities, of course, that have projects, dreams, and they don’t know how to, really how to maneuver through the maze of different governmental institutions, state, federal, private. Right now, she’s meeting with a lot of the state agencies and USDA. And they’re all on board. They’re all excited about this group. That there’s finally going to be somebody at the table that’s representing rural Michigan.

David Haynes:

I think that’s great. And I think the other thing that’s good is Gary, I think you and legislators on both sides of the aisle from the UP, during your era in the State House, in a state legislature, worked very hard on partnering and building coalitions for rural areas. In your case, we have Peninsula. And I think this office does that, steps that up is that more people will hear about the issues for rural people. They’ll know how to coordinate. I think it’ll bring about a lot of partnerships. Like the one you just described being at Traverse City. I mean, that’s an important step that rural areas, aren’t just the UP, they extend.

Gary McDowell:

Right? Like Traverse city and Marquette are two small cities that are very vibrant and prosperous. But you get just a few miles away to go across the UP like myself. I live in Rudyard, small community here. I’ve seen the change over my lifetime from a vibrant small town to now it’s a ghost of itself almost. And yet these small communities like Rudyard, I’ve lived in all my life. A lot of times you just don’t know where to turn to. You got your township board, they’re part-time. You don’t have any full-time employees. You definitely don’t have a developer or somebody. And now this office will be their partner and working through whatever dreams, aspirations you have for your community. We want to be your partner in that.

David Haynes:

So with that, that’s a lot of excitement and a lot of news, right there. Anything else going on in the department, you want to tell our viewers about, our listeners?

Gary McDowell:

Right now, one of the things we are really taking up a lot of our time, it’s a very important issue is how the contagious avian Asian bird flu, there’s been several cases, been four in the upper peninsula now. We’ve been pretty fortunate here in Michigan. Several flock have been affected, but they’ve all been small, mostly all been backdoor, backyard, not commercial flocks. I just can’t stress enough how important is if you have birds, make sure you keep them protected. Keep them indoors right now. Because this is spread through the wild bird population. And right now I think there’s been 35 million birds in Michigan commercial, not Michigan, excuse me, United States who have already had to be depopulated. And when this happened in 2015, it ended up being about 50 million birds. So you can see what that does to our poultry business and demand on eggs and the price of eggs.

And so just, we got to be very vigilant and making sure that you have birds, you got to make sure that they not have any contact at all with wild birds. And if you yourself have poultry, make sure you take your biosecurity measures seriously. If you go even from coop to coop or anywhere, nearly anybody else that has poetry, disinfect your clothes and whatever you got to do, because it’s just so contagious this disease. And that’s another thing that we are looking at too, is at the department right now, we’re doing emergency management exercises across the whole state. We have eight regions in Michigan and we’re doing eight of these exercises with all our employees. So they’re all are trained in emergency management.

And this just brought a good example in the pandemic. There’s so many emergencies there. And then with this flu and stock like African swine flu is now in Dominican Republic, possibly in Mexico. So we’re just doing everything we can do. Working with all our producers to make sure we’re prepared for this disease too. So we’re asking the legislators, the governor for more people, emergency management. Because right now it’s a good example with this bird flu, we are just stretched to the limit. We have to investigate every time there’s a possible [inaudible 00:14:08] or a flock that could be contaminated. We hope our legislators too will support that.

David Haynes:

So on a different issue, are you hearing a lot about inflation in rural areas that how it’s impacting not only families, but small businesses, farms, are you hearing that as you’re out and about, or is it not an issue?

Gary McDowell:

Oh no, it is an issue. The farm community, well with everybody in this day. But I’ve been doing business tours coming out of the pandemic, going around, talking to our businesses and lessons learned, what we can do at MDARD, as a state going forward, rebuilding our economy. And also, like I said, with anything, we can do better. And with the AG community, especially with the fertilizer costs, they’ve been doubled, tripled. So it’s even hard to get fertilizer at all at this time. And especially of course we’ve had these flight chain issues where anywhere in the supply chain issue, if there’s one little hiccup, all of a sudden it comes, you’ve got major problems.

With the war going on now in Iraq, cause so much of the world’s potash comes on a Belarus and Russia and the wheat from Iraq, I think it’s 28% of the wheat grown in the world because that’s the bread basket of Europe, supplies so many of our countries in Africa and Asia that get their wheat from Iraq. And there’s no way I don’t think that we can make that up. We just don’t have the capacity.

So it’s going to be continued inflation because of these demands because of this war and also because we’re just coming out of this worldwide pandemic, but that’s part of the long range solution to this as I was just discussing earlier is the governor’s 30 million for ag development to make sure we have more food grown processed right here locally, or least in the United States. So we’re not dependent on countries that sometimes aren’t friendly to us. Like you can see what’s going on right now. So that’s one thing we’re really working on and hopefully continue, we get the support. So we continue with that program and make sure hopefully we never get in the situation again.

David Haynes:

Well, Gary, I promised your staff that I would get you done in 20 minutes and I’ve got to keep that cause otherwise they won’t let me talk to you again

Gary McDowell:

A little over to keep my schedule going about this. You try talking about Michigan ag. You can just talk and talk and go on. There’s so many issues. We’re just such a powerhouse with ag, 300 commodities. And we lead the nation in so many different crops grown. And it’s just a big part of our economy. It’s a $104.7 billion last year that ag and food contributed to Michigan’s economy, 805,000 people employed in this business

David Haynes:

Amazing.

Gary McDowell:

It is, really is.

David Haynes:

Most people don’t understand that as much as they don’t understand what the definition of rural is that you can have different rural communities, just like you can have different urban communities with similar problems. And it’s a great. And I think that Governor Whitmer and you and Senator Stabenow, Senator Peters. But Senator Stabenow, especially with her work on rural issues over the years and her coming from like you, from a small world community and farming is important to have those voices as it has been. I would also say with in the legislature with Representative Cambensy and Senator McBroom on different sides of the aisle. The more people that had that experience and talk about it, the better it is for all of us. So thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. And we’ll follow along with what happens in deputy director Lucas’s office and we’ll let our readers and our listeners know about it.

Gary McDowell:

Well, I really appreciate this Dave. I appreciate the opportunity and everybody have a great day.

David Haynes:

Yep. Everybody have a great day and I’ll talk to you soon.

Gary McDowell:

Okay. Bye.

David Haynes:

Thank Gary. Be safe.

Gary McDowell:

You too.