Each year the annual crop reports published by California’s county ag commissioners tend to highlight something noteworthy in their various departments. For Monterey County earlier this year, that topic was the floods they experienced in early 2023. This was done under the theme “together we rise.”

This year Fresno County Agricultural Commissioner Melissa Cregan covered a topic she says has been on her mind for years. It’s a topic that most people don’t think about, nor is it part of the intent of the annual reports that are required by the California Food and Agriculture Code’s ethos to summarize acreage, production, and commodity values.

Yet every day we see or experience evidence of what Cregan told me recently is “half of my job.”

Cregan, as are her colleagues in the other county ag departments in the state, is also the sealer of weights and measures. That’s perhaps the most underreported and undervalued role in the county, yet it may be the most important. In the case of other states, that role may rest with the state’s department of agriculture. Such is the case in Arizona.

Her name may be the most widely published in Fresno County as it is on official seals posted to every gas and diesel pump in the county. If ever you want to know who the ag commissioner and sealer of weights and measures is in a California county, just look at the yellow seal on the gas pump next time you’re filling up.

“In every transaction, an impartial and largely unseen third-party watchdog has been an essential element to ensure fair and honest trade,” according to an explanation of weights and measures in Fresno County’s annual crop report.

In California that role of weights and measures operates under the purview of the California Department of Food and Agriculture and is largely delegated to the counties. Everything from the checkout line scales that weigh bulk produce at the grocery store to the sensors that measure gas or diesel bought at the pump are carefully inspected and regulated by third party agencies to ensure transparency and trust in those transactions.

Cregan says her office will also buy boxed goods from grocery stores to inspect them for the weight or volume as printed on the packaging.

This important role is to ensure that the products we buy by weight or volume are what they claim. That gallon of gasoline at the gas station needs to truly be one gallon of fuel – nothing more or nothing less. Even bulk firewood sold by one person to another is required to meet a physical standard of 128 cubic feet, neatly stacked, according to the CDFA. County sealers of weights and measures have authority to enforce that as well.

We expect fair standards when we buy goods by weight or volume. This is what our weights and measures officials provide.