Last month, Indiana Governor Mike Braun immediately replaced all eight members who had been on the board for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) with nine new appointees—including Don Lamb, Director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture (ISDA).
“Agriculture a is $35 billion industry in Indiana, and when I think about economic development, I get very excited about agricultural economic development for that reason,” says Lamb, who tells Hoosier Ag Today that he’s looking to forward to using his new role as a member of the IEDC board of directors to help further grow Indiana’s ag economy and to continue to grow the value of the crops and livestock produced by Hoosier farmers.
“When we take what we’re already doing—the ‘cows, sows, and plows’ or whatever you want to look at it—when you take those raw products that we produce and then you make more out of that, you add value to that. That really means a lot to the local economy,” says Lamb.
“It also really means a lot to our nationwide economy, because then we have a product that we can trade overseas, as well as a product that adds value to somebody that can’t do what we can do here in Indiana,” he says.
Lamb also tells Hoosier Ag Today that the priorities of the new IEDC board will be shifting under Governor Braun’s direction.
“One of the keys, I would say, is there is going to be a lot of focus on helping a current business do better,” he says. “So, in Indiana, when you look around at what we produce and what we do—what can we do to further help that company grow and thrive? If that means bringing in another business that is somehow a synergistic business to one of them and helping make that happen, that would be an awesome thing to see.”
Lamb points to Weaver Popcorn and Red Gold as two Indiana-based ag companies that have benefited from the state’s economic policies.
“They’ve taken this farm product, and they’ve really figured out how to manufacture that into a product that you can sell straight to the consumer. So those are just two great examples, between Weaver Popcorn and Red Gold, where they’ve done very well. Indiana needs to do whatever it can to help them continue to succeed,” he says.
Lamb spoke with Hoosier Ag Today on Tuesday at the ribbon cutting ceremony hosted by CountryMark at the Mount Vernon refinery in Posey County. The farmer-owned cooperate was celebrating the completion of their $100 million project that expands the production of renewable diesel fuel using feedstocks including soybean oil.
“I am always going to talk about ‘Team Ag Indiana’ if I get a chance and this is a great example of it,” says Lamb. “When I think about CountryMark and what they do for farmers, what they do for local economies, what they do for clean fuel, they’re a part of ‘Team Ag Indiana’. They do things that I don’t have to know how to do. Farmers don’t have to know how to make great fuel because you’ve got a team like CountryMark. We’ve seen that all across the state. That’s really what being a part of ‘Team Ag Indiana’ is about. It’s playing to your strengths and then being part of the team that doesn’t care who gets the credit.”
Governor Braun and the new members of the board that he had appointed—including Lamb—officially met for the first time on June 25 at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis.
Braun has vowed to reform the agency to increase transparency, which is already undergoing a forensic audit of IEDC’s previous accounting practices—as well as those of affiliated nonprofits including Elevate Ventures, which is the agency’s spin-off venture capital firm. The audit had been ordered by Braun over concerns about how money had been spent and how the IEDC had managed the LEAP project in Lebanon.
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