Agriculture and Farm Policy in Georgia District 157: Standing Up for the Family Farms That Built This District

Drive any farm road in Tattnall, Jeff Davis, Appling, or Evans County in early spring and you will smell it before you see it: sweet onions coming out of the ground, headed for a packing shed, then a Publix produce aisle five hours north. That smell is not a novelty crop or a tourist attraction. It is the backbone of a regional economy that stretches from the sandy loam fields around Glennville to the poultry houses of Hazlehurst to the timber tracts that cover much of Appling County.

Statewide, agriculture and agribusiness generate about $91.4 billion in annual economic impact for Georgia, according to the University of Georgia’s Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development. But that number is abstract until you break it down county by county, family by family, and see who is actually carrying the weight, and who is squeezing them.

This page lays out where District 157’s farm economy stands today, the specific state and federal pressures bearing down on it, and what a Micah King administration in the Georgia House will fight to change. If you want the broader picture of how these costs hit household budgets across the district, read our economic plan. If you want to understand how rural hospital closures connect directly to farm family survival, see our rural healthcare policy page.

The Backbone of District 157: What Our Farms Actually Produce

District 157 sits inside the twenty-county region where Vidalia onions can legally be grown and marketed under the crop’s federal marketing order, and Tattnall County is not a minor player in that story, it is the center of it. Tattnall and neighboring Toombs County together produce more than 90 percent of the nation’s total Vidalia onion crop, a fact that should carry real weight in Atlanta but too often does not.

The numbers behind that dominance are substantial. Vidalia onions bring in more than $150 million annually to Georgia’s economy, and the trademarked sweet onion alone accounts for nearly 19 percent of the total value of all vegetables grown in the state. Operations like G&R Farms in Glennville support around 70 full-time, year-round employees and hire hundreds more seasonal workers through the federal H-2A visa program during planting and harvest. Comparable operations across the district, from Bland Farms to Shuman Farms, run at similar scale, which means the payroll, trucking, and packing jobs tied to one crop touch nearly every family in the district in some way.

Beyond Onions: Timber, Row Crops, and Poultry

Onions are the headline crop, but they are not the whole story. Forestry is a major economic driver in Appling and Jeff Davis Counties, where forests cover nearly two-thirds of the state and Georgia consistently ranks as the nation’s top forestry state. Poultry production is nearly universal across rural Georgia, with roughly 75 percent of Georgia counties involved in poultry and egg production as of 2024. Row crops, peanuts, corn, soybeans, and grazing operations round out a district economy that is diversified in its products but united in the pressures it faces: rising input costs, an aging farmer population, tightening credit, and a state government in Atlanta that too often treats rural Georgia as an afterthought.

Threat One: The State Is Letting Utility Costs Climb on the Backs of Farmers and Ratepayers

Farming is an energy-intensive business. Irrigation pumps, packing house refrigeration, poultry house climate control, and grain drying all run on electricity, and Georgia Power rates do not stay flat by accident. They are set through a process controlled almost entirely by five statewide-elected Public Service Commissioners in Atlanta, a body most District 157 voters have never met and cannot easily hold accountable.

Over the past several years, that process has not gone well for ordinary ratepayers. Georgia Power’s residential customers already pay some of the highest electricity bills in the country, and the average residential bill has climbed more than $43 a month over the past two years alone. That burden falls heaviest on lower-income Georgians, who use about 36 percent more electricity on average than their counterparts in other states, a description that fits a lot of working farm families in this district.

The Data Center Buildout and What It Means for Rural Ratepayers

At the same time, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a plan in December 2025 authorizing nearly 10,000 megawatts of new energy infrastructure, roughly five Hoover Dams’ worth of generation capacity, built primarily to serve a projected surge in data center demand. Independent analysts commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Science for Georgia have pushed back hard on the justification for that buildout, arguing Georgia Power’s request rests on a statistically improbable 1-in-500 demand scenario, and is larger than the entire projected growth for the whole Southeast region.

To its credit, the Commission has taken some steps to wall off residential customers from these costs. The PSC has stated its rules ensure residents, small businesses, and other electricity customers will see no increases on their power bills due to data centers, and ordered a freeze on Georgia Power’s base rates through 2028. But consumer advocates remain skeptical of how durable that protection really is once billions of dollars in new infrastructure are on the books. As one advocacy group put it after a May 2026 rate decision, a modest monthly credit does little to offset the scale of the buildout the Commission has already approved. Farm families running irrigation systems and packing house cold storage do not get a vote on that Commission’s rate case dockets. They get a bill. Micah King will push for real legislative oversight of PSC decisions and for hard, enforceable protections that keep large corporate load growth from ever being quietly shifted onto family farm operations and rural households, not just promises made in a stipulated agreement that can shift again next cycle.

Threat Two: Rural Hospitals Are Closing, and That Is a Farm Policy Problem, Not Just a Healthcare Problem

You cannot separate the survival of a family farm from the survival of the hospital down the road. Farming is dangerous, physically demanding work, and farm families need care close to home, not an hour away in Savannah or Macon.

Evans Memorial Hospital in Claxton, a 49-bed facility that serves much of Evans and Tattnall Counties, is a case study in what is happening across this district. The hospital is planning for a $3.3 million shortfall in 2026, and administrators are contemplating closing its Intensive Care Unit as a result, on top of labor and delivery services the hospital already closed back in 2010. This is not an isolated case. At least 20 hospital facilities statewide are considered at risk of closure this year, with nine classified as facing “immediate risk,” according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform and the Chartis Group. Since 2010, Georgia has already lost nine rural hospitals, putting the state third in the nation for rural hospital closures, behind only Tennessee and Texas.

Maternity Deserts Across the District

The damage is not limited to hospital closures outright. It shows up in the specific services rural hospitals can no longer afford to offer. A 2022 March of Dimes report, cited in a January 2026 Georgia Trend analysis, identified Appling, Jeff Davis, and Evans Counties as maternity care deserts, with Tattnall County also flagged for low access to birthing facilities. Statewide, nearly 66 percent of Georgia counties have no obstetric hospital or birth center at all, and 43 percent lack an obstetric provider of any kind. That means expectant mothers across District 157 are routinely driving well over an hour for prenatal care and delivery, a burden that falls hardest on farm families already working sunup to sundown.

Federal Medicaid cuts included in the 2025 budget reconciliation package are accelerating this trend. Hospital administrators at facilities like St. Mary’s Sacred Heart in Lavonia have pointed directly to roughly $1 trillion in federal Medicaid funding cuts as a contributing factor in their decision to consolidate obstetric services. A federal fund intended to offset some of that damage exists, but it is up to the state government to apply for and distribute that money, and Georgians deserve a legislature that treats that application as an urgent priority, not paperwork. For our full plan to fight for rural hospitals and maternity access, read our rural healthcare plan.

Threat Three: Property Taxes, Conservation Use, and the Fight to Keep Land in Farm Families’ Hands

Georgia does have one meaningful tool to protect working farmland from being taxed at full market value: Conservation Use Valuation Assessment, created under O.C.G.A. Section 48-5-7.4. Under CUVA, qualifying agricultural and timber land is assessed at 40 percent of its current use value rather than full fair market value, protecting owners from being pressured by property tax burdens into converting farmland to residential or commercial use. To qualify, an owner must enter a 10-year covenant with their county, and current law caps enrollment at a minimum of 10 acres and a maximum of 2,000 acres per owner.

This program matters enormously in a district where outside development pressure, from data center site scouting to speculative land buyers, is starting to reach even rural counties that never used to see it. But CUVA only works if family farms can actually access it, and that is where a second, quieter crisis comes in.

Heirs’ Property: The Land Loss Crisis Nobody in Atlanta Talks About

Across the rural South, land passed down informally, without a will, becomes what’s known as heirs’ property, jointly owned by every descendant of the original owner under Georgia’s intestate succession laws. It sounds like a technicality. It is not. Researchers estimate that 14 million acres of heirs’ property has been lost since the Civil War across parts of Georgia and South Carolina alone, and the damage has fallen hardest on Black farm families: African American farmland ownership dropped from nearly 16 million acres nationally in 1910 to less than 3 million acres by 2017. Heirs’ property complicates everything, from qualifying for a USDA operating loan to enrolling land in CUVA to simply proving who has the legal authority to sign a lease. Micah King supports strengthening funding for legal aid partitions and title-clearing programs, like those run through USDA’s Farm Service Agency mediation program, so that every family farm in this district, regardless of how the deed was passed down, can actually use the protections Georgia law already offers.

Voters should also know that a ballot measure is before Georgians in 2026 to raise the CUVA acreage cap, reflecting the reality that family farm operations have consolidated and grown larger over time. That is a reasonable adjustment, but it should not come at the expense of continuing to invest in the legal infrastructure that helps small and mid-sized heirs’ property owners keep their land in the first place. For more on how we approach property tax fairness broadly, read our economic plan.

Threat Four: Extreme Weather Is Getting More Expensive for Farmers to Absorb Alone

This district’s growers do not need a briefing on climate volatility, they live it every planting season. A March 2026 hard freeze hit every county, every field, and every stage of Vidalia onion growth according to University of Georgia Extension Service reporting, with the total economic damage to Georgia’s economy estimated to potentially exceed $100 million. Just weeks earlier that same season, growers were already fighting drought conditions, with farmers reporting reduced yields tied to a lack of subsoil moisture. These are not once-a-decade events anymore. They are becoming the normal operating environment for Southeast Georgia agriculture, and state disaster relief and crop insurance support programs need to reflect that reality rather than treating each freeze or drought as an isolated emergency.

Where Micah King Stands: A Farm Policy Built on Local Control, Not Atlanta Mandates

The through-line in every one of these fights, utility rates, hospital funding, property tax fairness, disaster relief, is the same: decisions that determine whether a family farm in Tattnall or Jeff Davis or Appling or Evans County survives another generation are too often made by people in Atlanta who have never walked those fields. Micah King’s approach to farm policy in the Georgia House is built on four commitments:

• Push for real Public Service Commission accountability, so that massive corporate energy demand from data centers and industrial developers never gets quietly shifted onto family farm operations and rural ratepayers.
• Fight for state rural hospital investment and full utilization of federal offset funding, so that Evans Memorial and every hospital like it can keep its doors, and its ICU, open.
• Defend and strengthen Conservation Use Valuation and heirs’ property protections, so land stays in the hands of the families who work it, not developers or speculators.
• Treat weather volatility as the new normal for state disaster and crop insurance policy, not a once-in-a-generation exception.

This is not an academic policy platform. It is a defense of the working families who feed this state and this country, against a set of Atlanta-driven and out-of-state corporate pressures that show up in their power bill, their hospital’s ER wait time, and their county tax assessor’s letter.

What You Can Do

Farm policy in Georgia gets decided by roll call votes in the State House, at the Public Service Commission, and at your county courthouse, and every one of those seats is on a ballot. Here is how to make sure District 157’s voice is actually heard:

1. Confirm your voter registration and your current polling location with your county Board of Elections office in Tattnall, Jeff Davis, Appling, or Evans County well before Election Day.
2. Talk to your neighbors about what your farm or your family is actually paying in electricity costs, property taxes, or lost hours driving for hospital care, and share it. These numbers are the strongest argument there is.
3. Show up to your county Board of Tax Assessors meetings if you have questions about Conservation Use Valuation or heirs’ property, and don’t wait until a covenant is about to lapse.
4. Contact the King campaign to share your own farm’s story. The strongest testimony in Atlanta will always come from the people actually running the operations, not policy staff.
5. Vote like your family farm depends on it, because in this district, it genuinely does.

Family farms did not build Tattnall, Jeff Davis, Appling, and Evans Counties by accident, and they will not stay standing by accident either. It will take a State House that actually fights for them.