The district's specialty-crop economy and the agriculture record

USDA does publish district-level totals. In its 2022 Census of Agriculture profile, MI-4 had 3,246 farms on 537,983 acres and $1.64 billion in agricultural sales, 13% of Michigan's total. It ranked second among Michigan's 13 districts in fruit, tree nut, and berry sales ($169.9 million) and first in nursery and greenhouse sales ($360.3 million) (USDA NASS district profile). The profile doesn't break out individual fruits, so the crop figures below are statewide.

This connects to the tariffs covered in the Trade & Manufacturing piece. In the first half of 2025, while the U.S. tariffs and other countries' retaliatory tariffs were taking effect, Michigan's fresh cherry and apple exports fell sharply from a year earlier. Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Director Tim Boring attributed the declines to tariffs and to uncertain relationships with the state's largest trading partners, China, Canada, and Mexico. The figures show how much exports fell, not how much of the drop the tariffs caused. The source doesn't separate tariffs from other factors such as crop size or prices.

Neither figure is broken out by county, so I can't tell you what share of that decline landed specifically on MI-4 growers versus the rest of the state's fruit belt. USDA's district profile reports total farmland and the five largest crops by acreage, none of them fruit, so it can't say what share of the state's cherry and apple acreage lies inside MI-4. What can be said is that two of the district's counties, Allegan and Van Buren, are major fruit-growing counties and sit entirely inside it. So the district very likely absorbed some of the decline, but how much can't be measured from public data. That's an inference, not a measurement, and I'm labeling it as one.

Huizenga isn't on the House Agriculture Committee — his committee seats are Financial Services, where he's vice chairman, and Foreign Affairs. But he's introduced specialty-crop legislation directly relevant to this district's orchards anyway. With Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.), whose own district grows a lot of the country's produce, Huizenga has repeatedly sponsored the Protecting America's Orchardists and Nursery Tree Growers Act, most recently as H.R. 8251, introduced April 13, 2026. It would strengthen USDA's Tree Assistance Program, the disaster-recovery fund that helps orchard and nursery growers replant after storms, disease, or infestation wipe out their trees and vines. An earlier version, H.R. 4739, didn't advance past committee in the 118th Congress.

H.R. 8251 itself hasn't had a markup or floor vote, but its substance has moved inside the 2026 farm bill. On Apr. 30, 2026 the House passed H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026, 224–200 (Roll 154), with Huizenga voting yes and 14 Democrats joining most Republicans. The bill, sponsored by Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), reauthorizes and modifies USDA's farm, conservation, nutrition, credit, and research programs through FY2031. Its section 1002 rewrites the Tree Assistance Program using his bill's definitions word for word, adding biennial crops and pest damage, and a reworked version of its eligibility and replanting terms. His office says the farm bill includes provisions from his bill and that it will "help lower costs for the farmers who grow our food." The Senate received H.R. 7567 on May 19, 2026, and it isn't law. In my assessment, that makes the Tree Assistance Program changes his most directly district-aimed legislation to pass the House this Congress: a bipartisan bill written for orchardists, in a district full of them, carried by a larger bill he doesn't control.