An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That principle has been too often ignored in recent years as policies that harm Washington’s farms and farmworkers have been adopted without a realistic assessment of the damage they would cause.

The legislature can address that problem by adopting a policy that has a bit of a cost now but could help prevent major damage to the state’s agricultural industry in the future.

There is still time for the Senate Ways & Means Committee to do the same by scheduling exactly this kind of thoughtful policy that comes with a relatively small cost for a vote.

Substitute Senate Bill 5117 would require the state to consider the financial consequences of proposed legislation on our farms and ranches. The bill would require legislative staff to determine “the fiscal impact of proposed legislation which, if enacted into law, would directly or indirectly increase or decrease regulatory costs incurred by entities engaged in agriculture.” Legislators could consider those costs before adopting new laws and regulations that harm Washington agriculture.

The bill passed out of committee with a bipartisan vote of 8-1. But the Senate Ways and Means Committee has not scheduled the bill for a vote apparently worried about the cost.

The fiscal note for the bill noted the overall cost in the next biennium would be $246,000 with an estimated ongoing cost of just $113,000 in the four years after that. So, for a grand total of $472,000 over six years invested by Washington state, we could potentially avoid harming an industry that produces food and generated gross sales of $12.7 billion in 2022.

Looking at one-sided data – gross sales – might lead people to believe there is no need to protect our food producers. The same data set shows our producers incurred production expenses of $11 billion in 2022, a 30 percent increase in production costs over 2017. Most notably, the cost of farm labor and feed increased by 26.6 percent and 31.3 percent respectively between 2017 and 2022.

Increased production costs are just one factor that led to the loss of 3,717 farms and ranches between 2017 and 2022 in Washington state. Those losses work out to be an average of two farms per day, every day. Those losses do not follow a political party, nor do they follow a growing technique. Those farm and ranch losses were across every manner of voter, in every county, and every kind of producer – conventional, organic, large, small, row crop, livestock.

The loss of our food producers between 2017 and 2022 is a significant acceleration of the typically observed rate of attrition of farms and ranches. By comparison, our state’s total farms and ranches ebbed and flowed in previous counts. In 2002, there were 35,939 farms and ranches before rebounding to a total of 39,284 in 2007. Since the peak in 2007, farms and ranches have steadily declined in our state. However, that decline was relatively slow with a loss of 14 farms a month between 2007 and 2017 rather than the free-fall of two farms a day between 2017 and 2022.

Bills like SSB 5117 do not have a significant financial impact on the state’s overall operating budget but they can have a tremendous return on investment. One bill to encourage our lawmakers to consider how their policies effect the farms and ranches of our state. A one-time investment of $246,000 with an on-going investment of just $113,000 thereafter to ensure that our food producers are part of the state’s overall policy conversation. It is a small price to pay to maintain locally grown food that is readily accessible while providing jobs for more than 150,000 people and protection for more than 13.8 million acres of farmland.