Stiles enters race for commissioner of agriculture | Journal-news

MARTINSBURG – Deborah Stiles has been doing, researching and writing about farming all her life, and now, she’s decided to run to be West Virginia’s commissioner of agriculture.

Stiles will be on the ballot during the Nov. 5 general election and is running as a Democrat.

Farming has been an important part of Stiles’ entire life, having been born in West Virginia and raised by her father, an agricultural extension agent for West Virginia University’s Extension Office.

Throughout her childhood, she moved all around the state, including Randolph, Calhoun, Braxton and Tyler counties.

“I’ve kind of got these roots that are kind of all over the state,” Stiles said.

After leaving West Virginia to get an education, Stiles worked as an agricultural journalist in the early 1980s, serving as West Virginia’s correspondent for Lancaster Farming. She eventually went back to school, working toward her Ph.D. on a Fulbright Scholarship in Canada.

While she was there, Stiles published multiple research articles on topics like access to capital for young farmers, sustainability and even some comparative research of West Virginia and Nova Scotia.

For a time, she served as a professor at Nova Scotia Agricultural College, where she worked to advocate for farmers and do research that would illuminate the challenges they faced. She also served as director of the Rural Research Centre from 2008-2013 at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, holding the position of associate director prior to that.

Stiles returned to West Virginia just after the pandemic hit to be closer to family and has been working on bringing back her father’s small farm ever since. Her experience there brought her to where she is now, running to be West Virginia’s agriculture commissioner.

“I just found it very challenging, as a small farmer, to really get started — gain access to markets, get advice,” Stiles said. “There are some great programs out there, but it is challenging.”

She said she made the decision to run when she saw holes in the ballot, noticing that there was no Democrat running for the delegate seat in her home district. From there, she decided agriculture commissioner was the position she would run for, having been reached out to by the state Democratic Party.

“There continued to be these holes in the ballot, and I decided to fill one,” Stiles said. “I just thought, ‘Well, we really need more people, you know, so that people have a choice.’’’

Since she made the decision to run, she’s been traveling the state and engaging with local farmers to find out about the issues that are pressing them, as well as what they feel her priorities should be.

She said one issue that she’s focused on is helping West Virginians who can’t access as much healthy, grown-in-West-Virginia food as they would like. Supporting local farmers, large and small, is another priority for her.

“We have farmers who feel that they’ve been kind of left hanging,” Stiles said. “They just feel that there has not been the emphasis on supporting the various commodity groups that we have in this state, and they’re our backbone.

“If I got into the job, I would be taking a very close look at everything and try my darndest to streamline things so that farmers don’t have so much red tape to deal with, that they can access markets without 15 gazillion things that they have to do before they can even access the market,” she added. “Regulations do not have to be onerous to be effective.”