Does state spread manure in counting its cash crop?

• Position: North Carolina

Agriculture in North Carolina is important and bigger than ever!" Jim Graham wrote in his introduction to the 1994 agricultural statistics report. "Last year, North Carolina ranked third in net farm income with agriculture and agriculture-related industries contributing $42 billion to the State's economy and employing 21% of the work force.

"Now that might sound like. I am braggin' on North Carolina agriculture," the state agriculture commissioner added, "but it's not braggin' when it's true."

But is it true?

It's true that North Carolina was the nation's ninth-largest farming state in cash receipts in 1993. But that $5.59 billion was a relatively minor contribution, 4.1% to be exact, to a gross state product that hit $136.3 billion. And according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, agriculture and agricultural services (including forestry, fishing, veterinary medicine and yardwork) employ only 3.4% of North Carolina's work force.

So why does agriculture rate a 1,350-employee department in state government and a commissioner who's elected like the governor, not appointed like the secretary of commerce? After all, there's no state chemicals commissioner, no Department of Textiles.

"Food is the single most important commodity we have," points out Jim Devine, Agriculture's public-affairs director. "We can do without everything else, but you can't do without food."

Still, no other industry in North Carolina is treated as royally as farming. "There's no doubt that we spend a great deal more to subsidize the agriculture industry than we spend to subsidize almost any other industry," says John Hood, vice president of the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank in Raleigh. If you look ahead, he adds, "in the 21st century, I think it makes little sense to have a Department of Agriculture."

The Agriculture Department, formed in 1877, had a $69.9 billion budget in fiscal 1995, some of it from licensing, permits, inspection fees and federal grants but $45.6 million appropriated right out of state government's general fund. "That is basically a taxpayer subsidy of private industry," Hood contends. The department's division of marketing, the only industry-specific marketing division to have the state foot its bills, got $5.8 million of its $6.7 million from state coffers. State government allocates $125,000 year for the North Carolina Farm Bureau Federation, a private farm-insurance and lobbying enterprise.

The justification for plowing...