Agricultural  businesses throughout Florida now have updated Best Management Practices (BMP) to help guide through changing developments.

Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson has detailed the completion of updates to nine agricultural Best Management Practices manuals for the state. The BMP manuals provide guidance on how to improve water quality, how to handle smaller farms and livestock among other areas included in the documents.

Simpson’s office is touting the manual updates bring the first revisions in about two decades for many of the manuals and included advancements in agricultural science and oversight of multiple practices for farmers. The project on revising the manuals started about two years ago when Simpson took office.

“Florida’s farmers, ranchers, and growers are the original stewards of our land and water resources, and these updates ensure they have the latest, most effective tools to continue producing the safe, affordable, and abundant food supply we all rely on,” said Simpson.

“These Best Management Practices manuals, updated in partnership with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the University of Florida (UF), and industry partners, provide real solutions that benefit both Florida’s natural resources and our agricultural economy.”

UF Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources Scott Angle said the updates to the manuals were long overdue.

“I commend Commissioner Simpson for the completion of updating all the agricultural BMP manuals. It was a huge undertaking and essential to Florida agriculture,” said Angle, who is also the leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “Sound science is a foundation of Florida farmers’ success. They rely on research that demonstrates what works in the field, in the grove and on the ranch. Commissioner Simpson is to be lauded for focusing on evidence-based agricultural practices that provide guidance on how farmers can best achieve water quality goals and support their livelihoods.”

The revisions appear to be welcomed by many in the agricultural industry.

“Florida growers and ranchers have long been leaders in the implementation of Best Management Practices to help grow our nation’s food supply and protect our state’s natural resources for future generations,” said Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association President Mike Joyner. “We are grateful to Commissioner Simpson for leading and prioritizing this significant effort to make needed updates to the BMP manuals. These new BMPs better align with the water quality goals of the program and ensure the overall requirements are practical and economically viable for growers.”

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Lori Matthias and her husband had tired of Atlanta traffic when they moved to St. Augustine, Florida, in 2023. For Mike Waldron and his wife, moving from the Boston area in 2020 to a place that bills itself as “the nation’s oldest city” was motivated by a desire to be closer to their adult children.

They were among thousands of white-collar, remote workers who migrated to the St. Augustine area in recent years, transforming the touristy beach town into one of the top remote work hubs in the United States.

Matthias fell in love with St. Augustine’s small town feeling, trading the hour-long commute she had in Atlanta for bumping into friends and acquaintances while running errands.

“The whole pace here is slower and I’m attracted to that,” said Matthias, who does sales and marketing for a power tool company. “My commute is like 30 steps from my kitchen to my office. It’s just different. It’s just relaxed and friendly.”

Centuries before becoming a remote work hub, the St. Augustine area was claimed by the Spanish crown in the early 16th century after explorer Juan Ponce de Leon’s arrival. In modern times, it is best known for its Spanish architecture of terra cotta roofs and arched doorways, tourist-carrying trollies, a historic fort, an alligator farm, lighthouses and a shipwreck museum.

In St. Johns County, home to St. Augustine, the percentage of workers who did their jobs from home nearly tripled from 8.6% in 2018 to almost 24% in 2023, moving the northeast Florida county into the top ranks of U.S. counties with the largest share of people working remotely, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

Only counties with a heavy presence of tech, finance and government workers in metro Washington, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte and Dallas, as well as two counties in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, had a larger share of their workforce working from home. But these were counties much more populous than the 335,000 residents in St. Johns County, which has grown by more than a fifth during this decade.

Scott Maynard, a vice president of economic development for the county’s chamber of commerce, attributes the initial influx of new residents to Florida’s lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in businesses and schools in the fall of 2020 while much of the country remained locked down.

“A lot of people were relocating here from the Northeast, the Midwest and California so that their children could get back to a face-to-face education,” Maynard said. “That brought in a tremendous number of people who had the ability to work remotely and wanted their children back in a face-to-face school situation.”

Public schools in St. Johns County are among the best in Florida, according to an annual report card by the state Department of Education.

The influx of new residents has brought growing pains, particularly when it comes to affordable housing since many of the new, remote workers moving into the area are wealthier than locals and able to outbid them on homes, officials said.

Many essential workers such as police officers, firefighters and teachers have been forced to commute from outside St. Johns County because of rising housing costs. The median home price grew from $405,000 in 2019 to almost $535,000 in 2023, according to Census Bureau figures, making the purchase of a home further out of reach for the county’s essential workers.

Essential workers would need to earn at least $180,000 annually to afford the median price of a home in St. Johns County, but a teacher has an average salary of around $48,000 and a law enforcement officer earns around $58,000 on average, according to an analysis by the local chamber of commerce.

“What happened was a lot of the people, especially coming in from up North, were able to sell their homes for such a high value and come here and just pay cash since this seemed affordable to them,” said Aliyah Meyer, an economic researcher at the chamber of commerce. “So it kind of inflated the market and put a bit of a constraint on the local residents.”

Waldron, a sales executive in the health care industry, was able to sell his Boston home at the height of the pandemic and purchase a three-bedroom, two-bath home in a gated community by a golf course outside St. Augustine where “things really worked out to be less expensive down here.”

The flexibility offered by fast wireless internet and the popularity of online meeting platforms since the start of the pandemic also helped.

“If I was still locked in an office, I would not have been able to move down here,” Waldron said.

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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.

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