Virginia’s new secretary of agriculture and forestry has rural roots, and he’s determined to help boost the bottom line of the state’s farm and forest producers.
Appointed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe last summer, Dr. Basil Gooden is the third person to hold the office in Virginia. Like his predecessors Todd Haymore and Robert Bloxom, Gooden hails from the country. He still works weekends on his family’s cattle farm in Buckingham County.
Virginia has had an Agriculture and Forest Industry Development Fund program since 2012, awarding grants of up to $250,000 to help companies in Virginia’s two largest economic sectors. While that program is focused on helping larger companies, last fall Gooden helped introduce a new Virginia Farm Business Development Program to assist small and mid-size farms or agribusinesses with no more than 20 employees. Grants from that program top out at $5,000, and Gooden said they are designed to help producers become more efficient and profitable through better planning.
“Whether it’s developing a marketing plan or doing more online selling of their commodities,” these grants can help producers, he said. “But this grant can also be used for farm succession planning or forest succession planning. That’s a significant issue here in the commonwealth of Virginia, because the average age of farmers is about 59 years old.”
In a recent interview for Real Virginia, Virginia Farm Bureau Federation’s weekly television program, Gooden said he also wants to focus on leadership development programs in rural Virginia, building on the work of some counties that have agriculture economic development boards. And he will further develop strategic partnerships within state agencies and the federal government. He noted that while he was state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development agency he was in charge of distributing $1.25 billion in federal grants each year.
“So the resources are there,” he said. “That’s money on the ground to help address issues, whether it’s telemedicine or trying to increase access to broadband Internet service. That type of money is coming from the federal government, and we need to better utilize that funding here.”
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