RALEIGH - While there's lots of talk about high tech jobs, and efforts to try and land an automaker, work down on the farm still matters. Now in office for a decade, Steve Troxler, North Carolina's Agriculture Commissioner, sat down with Carolina Newsmakers to talk about how, in North Carolina, agriculture is still king.

"Dr. Mike Walden at N.C. State University puts the value of the economic impact of agriculture and agri-business at $78 billion for the state of North Carolina," Troxler says. "It's the number one industry by a long ways. The military would come in at number two and it's probably about half the size."

On top of that, Troxler says agriculture is continuing to grow.

"Even during the Great Recession, we grew at a rate of about 6 percent per year," Troxler says. "My goal is to have us at $100 billion by the year 2020 and I think that's entirely reachable."

As North Carolina's agriculture grows, it also changes. Namely, Troxler says it is no longer as much about what comes out of the ground.

"I think one of the major things that we've seen change in North Carolina is we are now an animal agriculture state," he says. "About 66 percent of the farmgate income in North Carolina actually comes from our animal agriculture, primarily hogs and chickens and turkeys."

The state also has new trading partners for new products. As Europe moves away from coal and looks for new sources of fuel, wood pellets from North Carolina are being sold as biomass. And Troxler says twice as many forests are being grown as are being cut down to make pellets, which he says is good for the environment, since new forests are healthier than old-growth ones.

But Troxler also talks about whether one country where trade has recently become a possibility will become a trading partner: Cuba.

"I think long-term it can," he says. "Years ago, there were a lot of North Carolina companies that were exporting to Cuba. But right now, the primary problem is how do you handle payment? And there's still a lot of changes that have got to occur before it's going to be a really open market to our agriculture products."

Changes in agriculture are not just about the crops and livestock themselves but the tools used to cultivate them. Troxler says changes to technology, like computerized irrigation and self-driving tractors are huge developments. And even though technology cannot control the weather yet, he says weather forecasting equipment is a huge benefit.

"If you're in the East in North Carolina and you've got crops in the field and there's a prediction that there's going to be a major hurricane, you've got to be able to make adjustments in separation and preparation for livestock operations to be able to handle these kinds of things," he says. "That technology has helped us a lot."

Troxler also says drones can be useful in surveying crops and deploying materials, but has concerns about privacy invasions.

But Troxler says not all changes have been for the better. As the Agriculture Department faces budget cuts, he says the shift in state culture is part of the problem.

"We've been through a legislative change and redistricting and the majority of the people in the legislature are now from our large cities," he says. "Their focus is not necessarily agriculture and agriculture production. But we've got to change that educational process where they've got to understand this is about the food supply."

And food supply is something that concerns Troxler, as he says the world will need to produce 60-to-100 percent more food by 2050 to feed the planet's growing population.

"We've got to continue to do the agriculture research to be able to meet these needs of the world," he says. "The thing that I tell people is, if we don't meet these agricultural needs in the world, hungry people are mean people."