Commissioner of agriculture appointment breaks tradition

        On Jan. 24, the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee gave its unanimous consent to the appointment of Gov. Jared Polis’ choice for commissioner of agriculture, Kate Greenberg.
        Greenberg, who will become the first woman in the job, has been the western program director of the National Young Farmers Coalition since 2013.
        The Polis administration, in announcing her appointment, said she was a former “full-time farm worker,” but exactly how long or where is unknown. She told this reporter “I’ve worked on farms, small-scale, direct market operations, primarily hand labor,” for “years,” but when pressed for details was evasive.
        She inherits the position from Yuma farmer and cattle rancher Don Brown, who has been Gov. John Hickenlooper’s commissioner of ag since 2015.
        Greenberg’s appointment breaks with a decades-long tradition of commissioners with impeccable agricultural pedigrees.
        In the past 45 years, that’s included Brown and John Salazar (potato farmer), both under Hickenlooper; John Stulp (cattle rancher) under Gov. Bill Ritter; Don Ament of Iliff, a farmer and cattle rancher who served eight years under Gov. Bill Owens; Tom Kourlis (sheep rancher) and Peter Decker (cattle rancher) under Gov. Roy Romer, and Romer himself, a farm implement dealer, under Gov. Dick Lamm; and Tim Schultz, a Meeker rancher who also served under Lamm.

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