by Eric Freedman
January 16, 2009

Ag Director Don Koivisto at the Michigan Milk Producers Association plant in Ovid. Photos by David Trumpie

It was the sign that caught Don Koivisto’s eye as he started to drive back to Lansing from the Chelsea headquarters of Jiffy Mixes. There, in front of the New Chelsea Market on South Main Street, a sign boasted more than 300 Michigan products. Koivisto stopped the car, went inside and saw a cornucopia of homemade “Michigan made” labels on sauces, wines, even eggs on display.

The juxtaposition of Chelsea Milling Co., a more-than-century-old, family-run enterprise with more than 300 employees and national and international markets, with a small retailer selling state-produced foods reflects some of the challenges and opportunities that confront Koivisto as the official voice of an industry simultaneously prospering and struggling.

Two of the three legs of Michigan’s economic tripod are tottering. The domestic auto industry is in freefall, while the tourism sector has been pummeled by high fuel prices and the deterrent impact of fiscal hard times on business and pleasure travel. But agriculture, the third leg and a $64 billion-a-year powerhouse, holds steady, insists Koivisto, the state Agriculture Department director since September 2007.

“Things are on a positive upswing, although farmers will get mad at me if I say everything is rosy,” he explains. Sure, the rising costs of fertilizer, fuel, equipment and chemicals are taking their toll, dramatic price swings buffet commodity prices and efforts to build foreign markets for Michigan agri-products face uncertainties in light of unpredictable international currency rates. As for the weather in Michigan and its impact on farmers, enough said.

But he points to a number of positive signs, including strong demand for dairy products, the proliferation of farmers’ markets — more than 1,000 statewide — and a burgeoning wine and wine-tourism sector, with five new wineries expected to open this year. Add to that a coordinated multi-agency drive to promote agricultural entrepreneurs, including the “A (for Agriculture) Team” concept he introduced. The team approach calls for aspiring entrepreneurs who contact the department to be referred immediately to Koivisto’s office — “the most important thing is the first call and how it’s handled” — and then Agriculture and Michigan Economic Development Corp. staff promptly set off together to move the prospect forward. The Department of Environmental Quality joins the team when a proposal involves environmental regulations and permits.

“Michigan’s agri-business sector is more than just cows, plows and overalls,” he says. For example, in December, Koivisto and Gov. Jennifer Granholm traveled to Fremont for the formal announcement that Gerber Products-Nestlé Nutrition will invest $75 million there over the next 10 years, retaining 1,100 jobs and adding 200. Gerber’s expansion project is designated an Agricultural Processing Renaissance Zone that qualifies the company for tax benefits.

Koivisto sees his unexpected stop at the little grocery in Chelsea as reflecting another good sign for Michigan agriculture: the appeal of locally and regionally grown and processed foods. One reason is affirmative: surveys show that freshness and wholesomeness—in other words, quality and safety—are consumers’ top priority, way ahead of price. Another is negative: well-publicized recalls of imported food products, as well as higher costs of transporting those products from abroad into Michigan.

While there’s been a lot of hoopla about biofuels and bio-energy, Koivisto sounds cautious amid news of problems at some corn-based ethanol plants. The state now produces about 300 million gallons of ethanol a year, the same amount it uses in gasoline blends. He attributes the October 2008 bankruptcy filing by VeraSun Energy Corp. to “poor guesses in the commodity market” rather than to insufficient demand. The company operates 16 plants in eight states, including one in Woodbury.

“We seek to stabilize the existing market,” he explains. The department will place its future focus on cellulosic ethanol that’s produced from wood and agricultural wastes rather than corn, but he predicts that corn growers will find sufficient other markets for their crops.

Personal roots
Koivisto’s roots are in a blue-collar family in the western Upper Peninsula. The son of a miner who lost his job when the iron mines closed and a receptionist at a doctor’s office, he grew up in Gogebic and Ontonagon counties. Like so many other displaced workers then and now, his father was forced to change directions and became a public safety — police and fire — officer, eventually retiring as the Ironwood fire chief. As a pitcher and shortstop in baseball, forward guard in basketball and quarterback in football, he lettered in all three sports at Luther L. Wright High School before heading south of the Mackinac Bridge to study political science and earn a teaching certificate at Central Michigan University. A photo of that iconic bridge, incidentally, is the screensaver on his office computer.

Koivisto tours the Ovid plant with MMPA’s David Wittkop and Clayton L Galarneau, Jr

After graduation, he stayed in the Lower Peninsula for several years to teach history, economics and government and coach football and basketball at Morrice High School in Shiawassee County before moving back to the U.P., where he made his first political move with an election to the nonpartisan Ontonagon Board of Education.

The partisan political door swung open in 1980, when state Rep. Russell “Rusty” Hellman, a Democrat from Dollar Bay, retired after 20 years. Koivisto won a five-way Democratic primary — he describes his opponents as friends, one of whom slept at his home while making local appearances on the campaign trail — and then defeated GOP candidate Gary Lange, who went on to become Ontonagon County prosecutor but was later disbarred.

Koivisto had no opposition in 1984 but walked away from the certainty of another term two years later, citing the strain on his young children. And, of course, there was the l…o…n…g commute between Ironwood and Lansing — roughly 540 miles each way. (Had Michigan’s borders been a bit different and he’d been a Wisconsin or Minnesota legislator, he’d be only about 260 miles from each of their capitals, Madison and St. Paul.) Lots of politicians claim "family reasons” as a matter of convenience when they withdraw from public life, he says, “but that was really true. I lay low, got reacquainted with the family” and worked part-time as a consultant to Democratic Speaker Lewis Dodak of Birch Run and to Jackson Rep. Mike Griffin’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules.

Opportunity knocked again and elective office beckoned with the departure of disgraced Sen. Joe Mack, the legendary Ironwood Democrat, who resigned as part of a plea bargain for misusing state and campaign travel and expense accounts. Koivisto beat three fellow Democrats for the nomination — one of them an ambitious young Bart Stupak of Menominee. When Stupak later ran for Congress, “I wrote one of his first checks,” Koivisto recalls.

Wayne Wood, president of the Michigan Farm Bureau, says Koivisto did important work for agriculture in the legislature. As chair of the House Agriculture Committee, “he was very involved in writing our right-to-farm act, the premier right-to-farm act in the United States.” And in the Senate, where he sat on the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, Wood says, “he came to agriculture’s rescue after a terrible year and was part of the group that put forward a zero-interest loan program to help farmers weather a disastrous fall.”

Term limits ended Koivisto’s Senate career at the end of 2002. He “took some time from the work world” for double knee-replacement surgery, then became a consultant and lobbyist for the mining company now called Cliffs but better known as Cleveland Cliffs, a major economic player in the U.P. He left the company when he became Agriculture director.

Of Koivisto’s leadership style, Wood says, “Don speaks softly and makes things happen, not that (his predecessors) were yelling.”

Lana Pollack, who just stepped down as president of the Michigan Environmental Council, served with Koivisto in the Senate, where she found him “direct and honest,” as well as “fun and good company” despite their ideological differences — she from Ann Arbor on the liberal end of the Democratic caucus spectrum and Koivisto the more conservative Yooper. She says the environmental organization hasn’t worked as closely as it could have with Koivisto as Agriculture director, given their overlapping interests — an omission she says “might be an oversight on my part” due to the press of other priorities. But she credits Koivisto with focusing attention on locally grown foods “much more than any of his predecessors,” although she’d like to see him more actively promote organic products and “low-pesticide, low-impact farming.”

Even the director’s vehicle promotes agri-business.

Pollack says the department should push more aggressively to tighten state laws regulating concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, the large-scale livestock and poultry farms that are often blamed for water contamination, noxious odors and other environmental ills. At the same time, she acknowledges the political reality that Agriculture “has very strong, very organized, very vocal constituencies — the Farm Bureau and other interest groups that are going to make themselves known to the commissioners and the head of the department.”

Capitol views
From his window in a corner office of Constitution Hall, Koivisto has an unimpeded view of the Capitol dome. “It’s much more cutthroat,” he says of legislative politics there today compared with the atmosphere before his departure six years ago. “It wasn’t as hostile in trying to address issues of importance. We legitimately had relationships, Republican and Democrat. We broke bread at private dinners.” There were disagreements, sure, but committee meetings were mostly cordial and “the leadership came together.”

Even so, from his vantage point on the opposite side of the legislative-executive branch table, he says relations between the Agriculture Department and lawmakers are pretty much the same as before. “If they need input or have a problem, they contact us. We try to give them honest answers.”

And although he’s not a gubernatorial appointee — technically, the Agriculture Commission selected him to replace another Upper Peninsula ex-senator, Mitch Irwin — he belongs to Granholm’s cabinet and is used to calls and e-mails from her. For example, during last year’s rapidly escalating gas prices, she phoned at 5:45 on a Friday evening and told Koivisto to immediately deploy department personnel to check pump prices and look for evidence of illegal price-gouging. He did. And there was the e-mail asking how the department can help school districts buy local produce for their cafeterias — she later signed legislation at the tail end of 2008 to make it easier for schools to do exactly that. And there was her call soliciting the department’s help to pursue development of the National Food Safety and Nutrition Center in Battle Creek.

He says of the governor: “Her communication style is the best of anyone’s. One-on-one, you can’t beat it.”

Continuities
Forty years after his high school athletic career ended, Koivisto remains a sports fan. He watched about three-quarters of last year’s televised Tigers games — “I was totally disappointed,” he said of the team’s last-place finish in the American League Central Division — and as much Michigan State basketball as possible, mostly on television but in person at its Thanksgiving Day loss in Orlando to the University of Maryland. As for football, he confesses to dual loyalties — the totally beleaguered Detroit Lions and the not-quite-as-bedraggled Green Bay Packers in the pros reflect his roots near the Michigan-Wisconsin border, and MSU and U-M in the NCAA.

For Koivisto, tradition and loyalty go beyond sports. About 60 miles southeast of Agriculture Department headquarters, the family-owned Chelsea company that brings Jiffy corn muffin, pizza crust and brownie mixes to supermarket shelves has been milling flour for more than 120 years. About 200 miles northwest of department headquarters, in Ellsworth, Antrim County, he sees similar continuity at the centennial farm where he and his wife settled when he left the Senate. Her great-grandfather, John Crawford, homesteaded there, her grandfather raised sheep and beef there, and a nearby farmer rents half the 160 acres to grow corn and soybeans. The farmhouse has been remodeled, but the old apple orchard still stands.

Eric Freedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, teaches journalism at Michigan State University and directs its Capital News Service. His most recent book is African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).