It’s a good thing it’s still baseball season, because the Washington Supreme Court recently took another swing and a miss that will hurt agriculture across the state.

The court on a 5-4 vote struck down a King County ordinance that allowed wineries and other agricultural operations to have tasting rooms in farm country. Such operations are commonplace around Washington — and the rest of the nation, for that matter. From Napa Valley, Calif., to Walla Walla, Wash., we can report that no winery tasting room damages agriculture.

The court ruled that such outlets aren’t allowed under the state Growth Management Act, which is aimed at preserving farmland.

The irony of the court’s ruling is that having wineries and even distilleries and breweries on farms can provide the revenue farms need to stay in business. Without them, the farms they support can fail.

For some reason, the court’s majority jumped to the conclusion that a winery is some sort of tourist trap that requires large paved parking lots displacing farmland.

Apparently, the justices are due for a field trip. Though there are a handful of large wineries in Washington, the vast majority are small and low-key. The worry that they in any way conflict with vineyards, hop yards or other farm activities is misplaced.

Strike that. The justices are plain ignorant to go along with that argument, just as they were ignorant in other agriculture-related rulings that have hurt farmers, ranchers and farmworkers, such as those governing overtime pay and environmental laws.

For many in agriculture, direct sales such as what occurs in tasting rooms are important revenue streams.

Wine tasting is a perfect example. On weekends and holidays, customers take a drive in the country to visit tasting rooms. While there, they sip wine, and many buy their favorite wine by the bottle or case.

Those sales help assure the wineries or other agricultural ventures such as distilleries can stay in business.

Banning them will have the opposite effect. It will take revenue away from farmers and potentially make their operations uneconomical.

The King County Council understood that when it passed the ordinance approving wine tasting rooms.

Nor would the operations be tourist traps. The county council required that 60% of the ingredients of the wine, beer or liquor be grown onsite.

We fully sympathize with the Friends of Sammamish Valley and Futurewise, an environmental group, which aimed to protect farm country by killing the King County ordinance.

In this case, however, the outcome will be to “protect” many of the county’s farm operations from making the revenue they need to stay in business.

If environmentalists and the supreme court want to protect farmland, they would be better off taking another swing — there’s more baseball lingo — at Washington’s Energy Facilities Site Locations Act. It is allowing solar and wind farm developers to gobble up tens of thousands of acres of farmland in direct contradiction of the Growth Management Act.

That farmland will be gone forever.