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Michigan’s congressional redistricting maps have been upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court. Now agriculture is figuring out how it can use this change to its advantage.
The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (MICRC) drew the lines for new congressional districts based on the 2020 Census. In the Lower Peninsula, Huron, Sanilac, Mecosta, Isabella and Crawford Counties all lost significant portions of population.
“It is not a good map for us,” says Jeff McAlvey, partner with McAlvey Merchant & Associates during a Michigan Corn Special Update webinar. “It shows that many of our key counties in the Thumb, Gratiot and Isabella have lost population. Many of our counties where we have the majority of our ag presence didn’t grow—they didn’t lose population.”
This population loss factored into the redistricting process for the Michigan House and Senate, which will have large impacts in central Michigan.
“Most of those seats have a piece of the city of Lansing or piece of East Lansing in them, which will dominate those seats in ways they weren’t before,” says McAlvey. “It’s going to make our job in the ag community more difficult because there are fewer seats where agriculture and agricultural communities are the dominant part of that district.”
Many of these new districts will have both urban and rural populations. Maureen Watson-Bolger, associate with McAlvey Merchant & Associates, says this could provide an opportunity for districts that previously didn’t have agriculture areas to learn more about agriculture.
“While it might not dominate the economy in a district or the population base in a district, there can be a chance to talk about ag as part of a district for some members that we didn’t previously have,” she says. “There’s a significant lift for educating those folks because we do have a number of members that when they weren’t representing an ag district, they were interested in the topic and learning more. Now we’ve got a chance to say, ‘You’re interested and don’t know as much, but why don’t you visit with some of our growers and learn more about it?’”
McAlvey says this provides an opening for agriculture to work hard and educate lawmakers on why the industry is important to the entire state.