MDARD director Tim Boring talks about Michigan farmer struggles

Tim Boring’s day job is leading the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, which supports and regulates the industry and is responsible for food and animal safety.

On nights and weekends, the sixth-generation farmer helps out on the family’s medium-sized grain farm in Stockbridge, halfway between Lansing and Ann Arbor.

As a student at Michigan State University, he was interested in cropping systems and took a shine to research — leaving with a bachelor’s degree in agriscience and a master’s and a doctorate in soil and crop sciences. Before being appointed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in March 2023, he was the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency’s executive director in Michigan and previously had jobs related to soil conservation and agribusiness.

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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How is agriculture doing in Michigan? 

It’s rough right now in a lot of areas, and it’s poised to get rougher, especially for production systems in Michigan that are designed around specialty crops. Labor availability has been really tough. There’s not a lot of room for margin in the first place. It’s tough economics of figuring out how to get labor onto farms. A lot of the H-2A (temporary foreign worker) labor wage rates are increasing and putting a real crunch on folks. (He also pointed to competition from imports). Peruvian asparagus can come in here and undercut at cost considerably. Turkish cherries have been coming into the market. We’re also poised to be falling off a cliff here with the general farm economy in the next year or two. Input costs are still holding pretty high. Cash grain prices are really falling. Livestock markets aren’t in great shape. We’re looking at some broader headwinds across the ag economy here in front of us. That’s really concerning here of how we position farms and make sure we’ve got safety programs in place for farms. A lot of that is, of course, informing our work here at the department. We’re really prioritizing resiliency, diversity. We’ve substantially increased our efforts around regenerative agriculture over the last year. Building up those programs that are putting more of a focus on how you grow it. Making sure that we’re building in environmental protections around products. If we, the consumers and the stakeholders, value greater climate resiliency in our systems, better climate outcomes, healthier water quality, greater carbon sequestration, more diversified production for smaller farms across the state, there’s got to be a value for that. Building those systems in place to make sure we’re capturing that sort of value is a big focus.

What can the state do?

We got $3 million (in the recently enacted budget) for the (new) Farm to Family program and importantly some added staff capacity. As we’ve traveled around the state in last year talking to communities about what they needed to grow farms differently, whether it’s urban space, whether it’s in very rural places, access to food and access to having markets to do something different on your farm continue to emerge. And those things are linked together. We’re in a state that grows a lot of different products. And all too often, the products that are on shelves or on your dinner plate from a restaurant are sourced from out of the region. Processing is sometimes limited. The distribution isn’t always the easiest from how we’re getting stuff from local farms up into these places. Too often, school cafeterias aren’t set up to source out of the community. It’s easier to call an aggregator and have the stuff show up on one truck. That becomes a real opportunity for the department to be building systems and have greater piece to this, of understanding how can we source Michigan products to create economic opportunities for farm families but do it in a way that are grown the right way into grocery stores, schools and restaurants. The first step for us is getting some food-system experts on staff here, that kind of live and breathe this work on a daily basis, that have some expertise in this already, and be building out these opportunities for how we as a state can be working together to put systems in place that address some of these ongoing challenges that keep being surfaced.

Where do things stand with the bird flu that has hurt the poultry and dairy industries?

We have a lot more knowns today. Michigan was really at the forefront of this outbreak at the national level. We started taking definitive steps in April, for instance. We had the first dairy farm confirmed (in) late March. Quickly, we had significant impacts to the poultry industry. We had a lot of questions of how the virus is being transmitted around, obviously in a different way, that it’s moving from dairy farm to dairy farm. We knew pretty quickly that it was moving from dairy farms to poultry operations through things like whole-genome sequencing. There were questions at that time of the safety of the milk supply and the health risk to people. We’ve really pushed hard and stood up a lot of science in real time to help guide that decision-making. We’re a little bit more focused in the approach today. We understand that milk is a contamination source and a transmission potential more so than perhaps other vectors. We know the pasteurization is safe and so our food system, our food security there, isn’t compromised in a real way with this. We know that the greatest health exposures today are around farm workers dealing with sick animals. It’s prioritizing those initial health responses to make sure that farm workers are protected but continuing to be guided by this broader this issue — the threat ahead of us is this virus persisting in the environment and mutating in a way that causes additional health risks to people. The poultry industry has been dealing with HPAI (Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza) for several years now. It’s new for the dairy industry.

Was Michigan a hot spot?

We certainly had more cases confirmed here on a dairy aspect and a human health impact. But that’s largely because we were looking.

Is there aid available for affected farmers?

The USDA came out with financial assistance to help farms (with) upwards of $28,000 for personal protective equipment, for on-farm pasteurization, to implement specific biosecurity practices. We followed that on with a $28,000 offer of our own tied to research participation. A lot of the research that’s guiding the effort nationally now was done here in Michigan. But at the end of the day, if you’re a farm that’s dealt with this in a real way, you’ve had far greater economic impacts than a few tens of thousands of dollars. A USDA (program) is open for enrollment now, and that compensates growers for upwards of 90% of the value of your lost milk production.

You issued an emergency order in May to control and prevent the spread of HPAI. Is that still in effect?

It is. That is in effect for six months. We’ve got another couple months here. We’re looking to how we continue to build out focused response efforts across farms after the expiration of that order. Those are ongoing discussions with industry partners and farm groups about how do we continue to build in protections here to make sure that we’re not spreading the virus further around the state.

Do you expect to extend it?

We haven’t talked a lot about the next steps on it specifically. We’re working closely with the industry on this. Everybody’s kind of rowing in the same direction here. Farms do want to make sure they’re prioritizing efforts for protections. So whether it’s a formal extension of the order or not, we’re all kind of working together toward these goals already.

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