PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to

Open the Markets Our Crops Depend On

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

Most people don’t realize how much of what we grow here leaves the country. Almonds are California’s single largest agricultural export — nearly $5 billion in a year. Pistachios are second. California grows 99% of America’s commercial walnuts, and a large share of them go to Turkey, Japan, and South Korea. Sacramento Valley rice has been selling into Asia and the Middle East for generations.

So when people talk about trade policy like it’s a Washington abstraction, understand what it actually is here: it’s whether the crop already in the ground has a buyer.

And here’s the part that gets left out of the argument. When another country retaliates against the United States, they don’t pick randomly. They pick the products that hurt politically and can be replaced easily. That means tree nuts, wine, dairy, and fruit — almost a description of this district. Our growers end up paying the bill for fights they had no part in starting, over industries they’ve never worked in.

A tariff fight is a bad week for a corporation with lawyers and a diversified supply chain. For a family with 300 acres of almonds, it’s the year. The tree is in the ground. It produces on its own schedule. You cannot decide in March to grow something else.

There are times when trade leverage is necessary and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the people who take the hit should not always be the ones with the least ability to absorb it — and right now that’s exactly who takes it, every time, because we are the easiest target on the board.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Count agriculture before the trigger gets pulled, not after. Before any broad trade action, require a public assessment of retaliation exposure by crop and by region — what gets hit, where, and how much. Right now that analysis doesn’t happen publicly, in advance, at the crop and county level. Put it in writing, in advance, where a grower can read it.

Make the aid match the damage, and make it fit perennial crops. When retaliation hits, relief has to arrive on the timeline of the crop rather than the timeline of a federal program. An orchard is a 25-year investment; a one-time payment on an annual formula doesn’t come close. Relief should reflect what a permanent planting actually loses.

Fund market access like it matters. Federal export promotion is the cheapest agricultural policy we have — it returns more than it costs and it is a rounding error against the aid we pay out after a market closes. I’d fight to expand it, paid for the same way as everything else on this platform, and to point it at the crops this region actually sells — opening buyers in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe so a grower isn’t dependent on one market that a single trade fight can close.

Go after the barriers that have nothing to do with tariffs. A lot of what keeps our fruit and nuts out of foreign markets never appears on a tariff schedule: a residue standard written to protect a domestic competitor, an inspection rule that stalls a container until the product is worthless. These are the quiet ones, and they never make the news. I’d put real diplomatic weight behind knocking them down.

Enforce the deals we already signed. We have agreements with countries that are not honoring them, and a grower here has no way to press the issue alone. Pressing it is what a trade representative and a member of Congress are for. A signed agreement nobody enforces is just paperwork.

What this means for Our District

Walk into any packing house in Sutter or Yuba County and ask where the crop goes. A lot of it is on a boat. The prosperity of this valley has depended on foreign buyers for a century, and almost nobody in Washington thinks about that when they pick a trade fight.

That’s the pattern with this district — we are a long way from the room where the decision gets made, and our congressman has been in that room for nearly 30 years. I’d be the one asking, before the vote, what it does to the almond grower in Live Oak. I take no corporate PAC money, no special interest money, and no foreign money, so the only interest I’m carrying into that conversation is this one.

The bottom line

We grow what the world wants to buy. Our job is to make sure they can buy it — and to stop letting the people who grow it be the first ones to pay for somebody else’s fight. Let’s go open the markets.

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