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GOP Pair Seek to Run for Office: Weathers, Bell in Primary Fight to Represent Party in Race for Agriculture

Posted on: Monday, 8 May 2006, 06:04 CDT

By Jim Duplessis, The State, Columbia, S.C.

May 8--Hugh Weathers, who has spent the past 20 months running the S.C. Department of Agriculture, is running to keep his job against Saluda County farmer William Bell in the June 13 Republican primary.

Bell, 50, was narrowly defeated in 1994 when he challenged incumbent Democrat Les Tindal, who served as commissioner from 1983 to 2003.

Weathers, 49, was appointed interim commissioner by Gov. Mark Sanford on Sept. 14, 2004, after the resignation of Commissioner Charles Sharpe, who pleaded guilty to extortion after admitting he took a $10,000 bribe to protect a cockfighting organization. Weathers took office on Jan. 17, 2005.

Weathers said he brings a business owner's sensibility to the office and is trying to use the department's clout to help small farmers sell more of their goods directly to the public.

"A lot of them have a feeling of being on their own," Weathers said. "The department can be more effective if it can link up the producers and consumers of agriculture in South Carolina."

Bell wants to pool South Carolina's resources with other states to market fruits and vegetables with a regional identification, moving away from the approach of identifying produce as grown in South Carolina.

He also wants to encourage development of technologies that would use corn, sugar beets or sugar cane to produce ethanol in South Carolina. "Agriculture is going to solve our future fuel and energy needs."

Both candidates have deep agricultural roots.

Weathers farms in the eastern Orangeburg County community of Bowman. He owns a dairy with 600 Holstein cows and 400 heifers, and a trucking business that hauls milk for about 30 farms in the region.

He lives in a home built in the early 1900s by his great-grandfather, who farmed cotton. His grandfather started the dairy in 1927.

Bell has been a full-time farmer for nearly 30 years in the southern Saluda County community of Ward.

"It's in my blood; it's what I know; it's what I have the talent for," Bell said.

Bell works on the family farm and leases six acres near North Augusta High School where he grows strawberries for his business, Bell Farms Strawberry Patch.

His father, Harry Bell, was president of S.C. Farm Bureau for 27 years.

The winner will face Democrat Emile DeFelice, 38, a Columbia resident and Calhoun County hog farmer, in the Nov. 7 general election. DeFelice faces no opposition in the Democratic primary.

Reach DuPlessis at (803) 771-8305

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Copyright (c) 2006, The State, Columbia, S.C.

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Source: The State (Columbia, S.C.)

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