Guest Column: A Green Industry Best Management Practices Ambassador
For more than a decade, Florida Rep. Yvette Benarroch has championed Green Industry Best Management Practices (GI-BMPs) to all who would listen.
The listeners are many. They include the clients of her Marco Island-based FNGLA Member Organization, Affordable Landscaping Service & Design. They are a network of associates she has cultivated as a real estate agent. They are the hundreds of industry professionals whom she has taught as a volunteer GI-BMP instructor for UF/IFAS Extension.
Now her listeners include 119 colleagues in the Florida House of Representatives.
Representative Benarroch’s new platform will raise the profile of her consistent message that GI-BMPs protect Florida’s water resources.
They also raise the profile of the green industry itself.
To Benarroch, GI-BMPs are an important way of talking about an industry that contributes so much economically and aesthetically to Florida. The guidelines say there’s a right way to fertilize, apply pesticides, use chemicals, and mow for maximum efficiency – saving money and maximizing plant, environmental and human health.
In Benarroch’s telling, GI-BMPs recognize this work as a profession when too much of society doesn’t.
The GI-BMPs establish green industry work as science-based, guided by the principles codified in the UF/IFAS Extension Florida-Friendly Landscaping™ Program and supported by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. More than 80,000 people have been trained in nearly 20 years.
And if you talk to her long enough about GI-BMPs, Benarroch gets you believing they’re about the American dream. They’re the way for a mom with two young kids struggling through the declining health of her husband to become a trained technician, businesswoman, expert and teacher. They are how she built a business. They established for her community connection that reached its apotheosis with her election in November.
Holding state office does not preclude her continued commitment as a longtime FNGLA Royal Palm chapter member and UF/IFAS volunteer. In fact, shortly after her election she reported to the UF/IFAS Collier County Extension Office to volunteer to teach yet another GI-BMP module.
And she told our regional coordinator for South Florida, César Peralta, that she’ll be back after the legislative session ends in May.
Why wouldn’t she? She’s been doing this, and doing it for free, for 12 years and in two languages. Born in Puerto Rico, Benarroch teaches as many classes in Spanish as she does in English.
She intends to continue teaching as an expression of gratitude to both FNGLA and UF/IFAS for teaching her what she needed to learn for certification as an arborist and a pesticide applicator.
Benarroch doesn’t have to directly promote FNGLA or UF/IFAS to serve as our ambassador. She’s already doing it by using her voice to champion science, professionalism and education as a path to prosperity.
J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).
