Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler today led the Senate in honoring Dave Roseleip, who will retire June 30 after 30-plus years as president of the Washington Agriculture and Forestry Education Foundation.

The foundation, better known as AgForestry, administers a well-respected leadership-development program for Washington’s agriculture, forestry, and fishing industries.

Schoesler is the prime sponsor of Senate Resolution 8667, which passed unanimously this morning (see photo). It salutes the many contributions made by Roseleip, an agricultural economist by education who was in the first AgForestry leadership class in 1980 and left the farm-banking industry to take over as the foundation’s president in 1984.

“Dave Roseleip spent a career developing two generations of leaders,” said Schoesler, R-Ritzville, a member of AgForestry’s 10th leadership class.

“It is not enough to excel at managing a farm or a forest or a fishery – that alone will not keep those industries going in our state. It also takes people who have the communications and public-policy savvy to work successfully with the folks on the outside who affect what we do,” said Schoesler, a fifth-generation wheat farmer. “Over three decades Dave and AgForestry produced one crop after another of the leaders who are needed not only by the agriculture, forestry, and fishing industries but also the communities that depend on those industries.

“The two years I spent in the AgForestry leadership program, and with Dave Roseleip, encouraged me to look for ways to make a difference where I live, and for the way of life I had chosen. It is no coincidence that I ran for a seat in the Legislature not long after that experience.”

The AgForestry program graduates a new class of leaders annually and is one of only a few such leadership programs to have a first-year class and second-year class going at the same time. The two-year track blends a dozen in-state seminars with study and travel at the national and international levels.

SB 8667 notes how Roseleip, who grew up in a longtime Montana farming family, has overseen the recruitment and selection of AgForestry’s seventh through 37th leadership classes, presided over the graduation of 31 of the 35 AgForestry classes, and helped the foundation grow to receive annual support from more than 750 paid members.