Laura Butler is focused on food

Chris McGann 
Communications

Laura Butler, WSDA's director of strategic initiatives
is enthusiastic about our new Focus on Food. 

This year, WSDA is launching a new Focus on Food initiative aimed at transforming the way people think about agriculture and our agency.

It’s an ambitious project that touches on almost every element of our agency’s complimentary missions and its success depends on large doses of creativity, energy, and organizational leadership.

Laura Butler, the agency’s director of strategic initiatives, is taking on the challenge.

Laura is leading Director Derek Sandison’s effort to refocus the agency’s mission and address the growing chasm between our rural and urban communities by highlighting food as the bedrock for all of our communities and agriculture’s role in putting it on the table.

The challenge includes:
• Promoting our role in food systems.
• Committing to support all aspects of growing, processing and distributing food.
• Protecting our natural resources.
• Helping farmers and producers connect with markets for their products.
• Assuring consumers that their food is safe.
• Making sure everyone in our state has access to good food.

Laura is leading Director Derek Sandison's effort to refocus our
mission and highlight the central role of food in connecting the
industry with communities. 

“We all eat, so the most common ground is that we all have food to live,” Laura said. “When you shift the conversation to focus on food, there is an opportunity to talk about that connection everybody has. It’s common ground, a starting place.”

Laura’s skillset

In her dual roles as WSDA’s director of strategic initiatives and state aquaculture coordinator, Laura wears a lot of hats – and shoes. In fact, she keeps a pair of muck boots in her office so she’s ready for anything from a meeting with a dairyman at a cow barn in Eastern Washington or an oyster grower on a muddy Westside tideland.

Laura is a sixth-generation Washingtonian who grew up talking politics around the dinner table with her parents, both prominent lobbyists, and digging clams on her family’s Vashon Island homestead.

She’s a hard-charging, people person who’s as comfortable catching cows for vaccinations with a vet at a stockyard chute as she is wrangling lawmakers outside a committee room to keep WSDA’s legislative agenda on track and moving.

And although she might joke that the muckers next to her desk would be the sensible choice for work in the legislative arena, her professionalism shines through wherever the job takes her. And, of course, she always opts for more stylish footwear when she’s representing WSDA in meetings with policy makers and industry representatives at the capital.

Background in people, politics and ag

Laura excels in the political arena, but she's also keenly
connected with the issues - and stakeholders more closely
 tied to the land.

Laura majored in animal science at The Evergreen State College and planned to go on to become a large-animal veterinarian. She spent several years as an intern for a food-animal vet, one who specializes in animals like dairy cows, beef, sheep and goats.

But before she got to vet school, she had a revelation.

“I figured out I like people more than I liked medicine,” Laura said. “Going on vet calls, I enjoyed talking with the farmers about their attachment to the land, or the food they grow or their animals. I enjoyed the dynamic relationship more than I did the medicine.”

Though Laura majored in animal science, she launched her current career lobbying for the health care industry before her interest in ag pulled her back.

“I always knew I wanted to work in agriculture,” she said. “So I often attended the agricultural lobbyists’ meetings before I landed at the Washington State Grange as their legislative director,” she said.

“A lot of the regional market support and economic development and food system infrastructure reflects back on that Grange history,” she said.

Focus on food makes sense

Laura is quick to point out how agriculture has always been integral to Washington’s identity and economic health, and she notes that food is the cornerstone of agriculture. Food grown, produced and processed in our state brings our diverse communities together. Food sustains us all nutritionally and economically. All across our state, food and agriculture add thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the economy each year – and put food on the table.

“We have this growing urban/rural divide in our state,” Laura said. “That divide has continued to grow politically, as well as with relationships. Agriculture happens all across Washington, but we find when we talk with legislators, many, particularly those in urban areas on the Westside, think we only work in large commodities and are primarily focused on export markets. The truth is we work with farms of all sizes and the majority of farms in Washington are small, family-owned farms.

In her role as state aquaculture coordinator, Laura goes on
camera for an episode of "Washington Grown."

“It’s time WSDA ramped up its efforts to tell the story of how we also serve and promote local food economies and smaller localized food systems,” she said. “We need to do a better job helping policymakers, consumers and producers understand how to support Washington’s food system on all levels.”

Although the project may be daunting, Laura keeps it in perspective. It’s a nod to the way food systems historically operated, she said.

“It’s important to remember this is nothing new,” she said. “Yes, there is new technology and there are things we can implement but when we are talking about local production and distribution, these needs go back to our roots.”

In summary: Laura Butler is leading WSDA’s new Focus on Food initiative, an effort to refocus the agency’s mission and address the growing chasm between rural and urban Washington by highlighting food as the bedrock for all communities and agriculture’s role in putting it on the table.