Utah Farm Bureau president discusses past and future of industry

Leland Hogan has been involved with agriculture his whole life. It’s a job that requires long days and hard work, but it’s one he wouldn’t trade for anything.

Hogan’s family moved to Rush Valley in the mid-1950s from West Jordan, bringing a dairy operation with them. Hogan worked with his dad, Leland D., on the dairy until about 1969, when the cows were sold. In 1972, after an LDS mission, he came back to the family’s 640-acre ranch. He and his brother, Bill, took over the ranch in 1974, and after farming alfalfa, started converting it to a cow-calf operation 10 years ago.

Hogan, who served as a Tooele County Commissioner from 1986 to 1994, segued into residential development in 2001 by developing 1,000 acres of property — 350 lots — his family owned on the South Rim of Rush Valley. His wife is influential businesswoman Joyce Hogan, community relations manager for EnergySolutions, current chairwoman of the Tooele County Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, and a former vice chair of the Republican Party in Tooele County.

Hogan, 60, was recently re-elected as president of the Utah Farm Bureau, which represents 27,300 member families engaged in all sorts of agricultural operations across the state. The Stockton resident has been involved with the lobbying organization since the 1970s. He went through the Young Farmer and Rancher program, was later elected to the board of directors, served as vice president, and for the last eight years has served as president.

As Hogan starts his fifth two-year term as president, he sat down with the Transcript-Bulletin to discuss his time as head of the Utah Farm Bureau and his thoughts on the future of the agriculture industry.

Q: You’ve spent a lifetime in the agriculture industry. Why are you drawn to this type of work and representing the people who do it?

Because I love it so much. I grew up in agriculture. I have a love for the outdoors and animals and soil and growing crops. It’s something that gets in your blood. There are a lot of other ways you can make a living. In agriculture, you’re property-rich and dollar-poor. It’s a difficult life. Every day there’s something that needs to be done when you have animals and crops and the responsibility for property. Days start early, days go late. You do whatever is necessary to get the job done.

Q: What do you rate as your biggest accomplishments during your previous terms as Utah Farm Bureau president and what would you like to accomplish in your upcoming term?

During the first part of being president of the Farm Bureau, our chief executive officer retired and we hired a new one. The CEO that we had had been there for 32 years, so that change was quite dramatic for the Farm Bureau. That was a major accomplishment to go through that and to have hired someone who has picked up the reins and gone further than where we had been in the past. He [Randy Parker] and I work directly together. There have been a number of legislative accomplishments that we’ve made. There was an initiative that was proposed to be passed that was going to tax specific industries and we took that on because we felt like that was improper for government to go that way. We defeated that initiative. Right now, one thing we’re working on is stream access and property rights. We look at property rights as being one of the most important things there is. The courts made a ruling that allowed people to trespass on private property and we’re in the process of trying to rectify that problem through the legislative process. That’s something we’re working on currently along with cap-and-trade and climate change. Cap-and-trade, I think, will be one of the — if not the — most important fight that we put on as long as I’m alive. Cap-and-trade has the ability to bring this country to its knees through higher energy costs, and through diminished production in a country that has the ability to produce all that it needs. Cap-and-trade will drive agricultural production out of this country and into foreign countries.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge facing Utah’s agriculture industry right now?

Energy costs. They’re being driven currently by legislation and by rule-making instead of by economics. That, in and of itself, has the ability to ruin us.

Q: What can the Farm Bureau do to help ranchers and farmers during this difficult time?

We’re doing it. We’re representing them in every facet that we possibly can — with the BLM, the Forest Service, with the Division of Wildlife and federal wildlife people, at the Legislature, in Congress. It’s not economics that’s causing the problem, it’s rule-making and laws that are driving up costs, and that’s where we feel like we can have the biggest impact on keeping agriculture viable.

Q: How can the industry overcome rising feed and fuel prices?

If our country would allow the entrepreneurship that we’ve shown over the last 200 years to continue to thrive, we could solve the problem of feed and fuel prices because this country has the natural resources to accomplish that. We’ve locked ourselves out of the ability to utilize our natural resources. For example, the coal deposit down in Southern Utah where the president made it a national monument, the oil leases in the Uintah Basin that have been pulled back. They’ve made it impossible to permit. We’ve got a lot of precious metals in Utah and they made it impossible to permit mines. It’s so hard to permit them that people aren’t doing it anymore. They’re going other places, mostly outside the U.S. And the BLM is getting more difficult to work with all the time and those are the kinds of things that are locking us out of those resources. I don’t want anybody to think that we should rape and plunder the natural resources that we have. We should use them wisely and in a way that in most instances they can be restored. But we have locked ourselves out of those ways, and that’s why we’ve driven these costs as high as they are.

Q: What would you like to see happen in terms of immigration reform to protect the agriculture industry?

You go back to the ‘60s and we had immigration policy that allowed people to come into the United States and leave the United States. Then we began to change the laws and we progressed to where we are today. We don’t have effective immigration policy at all. We’ve done the same thing with immigration that I think we’ve done with the natural resources. We’ve passed so many laws to make so many restrictions that we have gone away from the effective immigration law that we had. We need to look at what worked in the past and go back to it and make it work again. I don’t believe anybody should be in the U.S. illegally but the laws should allow people to come and to go without fear of reprisal. Now some people could interpret that saying, ‘You want to loosen the laws.’ I don’t want to loosen the laws. I want the laws that are there to be enforced and make it so we can conduct business across borders without the problems that we’ve had.

Q: Are regulations on how animals can be raised and slaughtered becoming more onerous? How is that affecting the industry?

Slaughter is offensive to a lot of people so we’ve tried to change that word to “harvest.” To our local facilities, the laws have gone beyond where they need to go. We’ve got basically one facility in the county that can do that, down in Grantsville, Tooele Valley Meats. For them, I think the laws have gone too far. But for the raising of our animals, no, it hasn’t become more difficult because we’ve always been humane in the way we’ve raised our animals. What I see happening is there are so many people who do not interface with animals and whenever they see anything that appears to them to be harmful to an animal, which may be a regular management practice on a farm, they get upset or worried that they’re doing something to animals that shouldn’t be done. In agriculture we treat animals very humanely because that’s where we make our living. If we can’t take care of them well then they’re not going to produce at the rate they need to produce. There are groups whose intent is not that we change the way we manage animals, but that we don’t raise them for human consumption anymore. They’re trying to push laws to the point to where, as an agricultural person, I can’t manage my animals economically.

Q: What’s your position regarding global warming? Is our climate changing and is that change caused by human activity?

I do not believe it’s caused by human activity. Yeah, we have an impact. I believe we need to be as respectful as we possibly can of our environment and do all that’s necessary in order to encourage our conservation of the environment. All these renewable sources of energy that are being developed — solar, wind, geothermal — are important pieces to the puzzle and we need to develop them as much as we can when it’s economically viable to do it. But coal has been the mainstay for the production of electricity in the U.S. from the beginning. We’ve developed a lot cleaner ways to utilize it. I think nuclear power is a thing we ought to get into in a big way in the U.S. The Farm Bureau doesn’t feel like the science is behind what’s being pushed as far as cap-and-trade, climate change. We believe in climate change and think it’s been happening since the beginning, but for us to believe that we can have an impact by changing some of the things that we do — I think it’s arrogant on our part to think that we can control the environment we live in that much.

 Q: Will agriculture remain a viable business in Tooele County? What segments of the industry and crops will perform best in the future?

Yes it will. We have a great resource in Tooele County for the production of cattle. We have a lot of BLM and forest property but the only way to harvest the natural resource that grows there is with cattle. We have a great future. The southern part of the county has the hardest time with crop growing. The northern part of our valley — Tooele and Grantsville area — is very fertile and is the best production ground in the county. I think there’s still a future for production of crops. The main crops that are going to be grown here will be some small grains, alfalfa being the largest, and some corn will be grown. The southern part, where I live, we’re going to continue to grow alfalfa and small grains.

Q: As a rancher, how did you make the transition to developing land for residential housing? Is that the future for many ag producers near fast-growing urban areas?

It’s been a fact from the beginning — you can look at the Salt Lake Valley, Salt Lake County, Utah County, Davis County, Weber County as examples — that agriculture was the base. Agriculture developed the water, developed the ground, put in the essential infrastructure in the beginning. As the population grows, that ground and those resources are turned over to urban development. For us in our area, and myself in particular, we looked at our resources and what we had. People have asked us for years to sell them property. So we took the area that was the least viable for agricultural production and that’s the piece of ground that we developed [in South Rim]. It’s the highest, it’s the nicest for building homes, but it’s also the rockiest and most undesirable for growing crops. Right now everybody is feeling the squeeze in our economy — agriculture and the development industry. We’re all going to have difficulty getting through what we’re doing. But agriculture will survive and it’ll be there because breakfast, lunch and dinner are really important to all of us.

Sarah Miley: swest@tooeletranscript.com