IDOA promoting homegrown products globally

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — From supporting rural communities to marketing products internationally, the Illinois Department of Agriculture provides a wide range of programs.

Kristi Jones, IDOA acting assistant director, provided insights into the agency’s programs in a fireside chat with Kim Kidwell, University of Illinois associate chancellor for strategic partnerships and initiatives, during the recent AgTech Summit.

Kidwell also serves on the Illinois Fermentation and Agriculture Biomanufacturing Tech Hub leadership team.

Jones, IDOA deputy director since 2020, previously served as communications director, Food Safety and Animal Protection Division manager, Natural Resources Division manager and State Fair assistant manager.

Kidwell: One of the beauties of iFAB is we have people from the discovery phase all the way to the commercialization in the arena together making that happen. Does IDOA have examples of that whole ecosystem built together from beginning to end where you can see something through?

Jones: If you have a product, but you don’t really have a lot of dollars to put towards marketing that product when it comes to food shows, whether small, medium, or large, we can get you in an Illinois pavilion anywhere internationally.

For example, if you have a pet treat and you want to take that to the world’s largest pet food show in Dubai, we’ll get you in there. We’ll get you there for a very low price point, and you can test it out and see how it goes.

Anything domestic and internationally, we have an office that is staffed to help small to midsize businesses. We also have staff in Hong Kong and in Mexico City.

Go on IDOA’s Bureau of Marketing website and our Illinois product program and we’ve added Illinois Grown to that logo program. There’s contact information and we’re very close to putting out our new electronic system where you will have many more mechanisms to search our companies.

We get phone calls all the time for people who say, “I’m looking for XYZ product to make my product. Can you put me in touch with another Illinois company? I want to stay in state.” That new technology is going to form a bridge there.

Audience Member: When you are taking a delegation to other countries, what are these foreign governments and foreign businesses asking you? What do they want to know about the Illinois agriculture?

Jones: They want knowledge sharing. They want to develop that relationship, but then have a liaison to introduce them to iFAB or have a relationship to introduce them to someone in the world of genetics, and those are things that are real, those are tangibles. We can make that happen. They want those connections.

Kidwell: Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been involved in some meetings where we’ve talked about market diversification. What are we going to do with all these corn and soybeans we have laying around. Do you guys think much about that, and what’s the talk about diversification?

Jones: We’ve never talked about it as much as we have this year, and I don’t think these were conversations we ever expected to have.

One example is that the government in India is not receptive to ethanol for vehicles at this time. I think they’re going to have to make a shift at some point with 1.5 billion people.

The tallest building I saw in India was a pharmaceutical company, and when you talk about cosmetics, there is a real interest in Illinois corn products, and Illinois ethanol, even though the transportation is complicated and there’s a price tag to that, there’s a need and a willingness to pay for it.

They very much understand the value of Illinois corn, and they’re willing to pay a premium for Illinois corn just like they are for a California almond or a Washington apple — the brand matters in India.

Kidwell: With what’s happening at the federal level, what can you do and can’t do at the state level from IDOA’s perspective to help farmers?

Jones: People might not realize the amount of work that we do either on behalf of USDA or we have dollars from USDA to execute those.

Under the current federal administration a couple days in, we got a letter that $14.4 million was being terminated for a program that we had put blood, sweat, tears into with the Illinois Department of Human Services and University of Illinois Extension.

Just to give a little bit of number to show impact, 176 beginning or underserved farmers were receiving fair-market value for their products, some for the first time. We had a cattle producer who showed us his invoice No. 1.

The first transaction that he made was through this program, and then to add another number to it, those products were going to community sites, mostly food banks in Illinois. So, 883 community sites overnight lost products that were coming to them, and they were fresh, nutritious, local element products.

Kidwell: Return-on-investment is the driver. Even as a researcher, I accept that that’s true. I love universities. We can take great risks here, but at the end of the day, fail or succeed, I usually get paid. I say “usually” because you never know what’s gonna happen next. When you think about ROI, some people say, “We can’t afford to innovate right now.” Farmers can’t afford to innovate. How would you suggest that farmers actually direct that conversation about what you’re doing, maybe what we’re doing in technology advancement to address their needs?

Jones: Two things, if you’re looking to make a purchase, make sure to exhaust your federal resources first. We can always act as a liaison. There are resources available.

We have the I-COVER program, which is a relationship with the federal government, and we have the state-funded Fall Cover for Spring Savings program. Cover crops and no-till are just a couple of opportunities.

There are opportunities where money still exists. If there is a technology you’ve been thinking about purchasing and if you are of the younger generation, that may be something that you’re a little bit more aggressive to purchase. I know there’s so many developments in the ag tech sphere around conservation, and I think that’s a real avenue for dollars.

Kidwell: What are some of the things you’re really jazzed about? Can you share with us what’s going on that makes you really hopeful for the future?

Jones: I love animal health. That is my passion whenever we have an animal health issue. Animal health is still something that I lose sleep about. I feel a lot better because the commodity groups sat down with us and said, “We don’t have a veterinary network.”

Outside of meat and poultry inspection, we were sitting with one field veterinarian at a time and we can’t have that. So, we went in front of the General Assembly and we have dollars that are in our budget now every year. We built our veterinary system to five field veterinarians. We hope to add a sixth in the Cook County area.

That is a huge testament to University of Illinois veterinarian education. Our two top veterinarians are U of I vet ed alumni. They are able to come over and spend quite a bit of time with the students, especially the students that are looking to graduate.

I didn’t think this would happen. I knew we were going to be able to get some veterinarians who didn’t want to work on Saturday and who really had a drive for health and public policy. But we now have had some vet med students come straight to us, and that’s really exciting.

When I was involved with this project in the beginning, we didn’t have the New World screwworm in the states, and we didn’t have high-pathogenic avian influenza at the numbers we do now — 77,000 birds within the past two weeks in Illinois. We relied so heavily on those veterinarians.

Please get the word out to young adults that there are still seats in veterinary medicine. You don’t have to grow up in a rural community to be a veterinarian.