-Caveat Lector-
>From www.defenders.org/fbp01.html
{{<Begin>}}
Farm Bureau vs. Nature
by Vicki Monks
Fall 1998
Part 1
Vicki Monks, a freelance writer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, reports frequently on
wildlife and environmental issues.
Out in the Apache National Forest on the Arizona-New Mexico border, Mexican
wolves reintroduced last March are already running into trouble. "The wolves
are threatening people," Eric Ness of the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau
(NMFLB) charges. It seems that some visitors to a guest ranch in the area heard
the wolves howling somewhere off in the forest. That scared these people? "If a
wolf is howling outside your door, that's threatening enough for me," Ness
says.
Ness's characterization of this incident as a threat is typical of the
hyperbole favored by many of the Farm Bureau activists who have made fights
against wolf reintroduction their cause célèbre. NMFLB is an affiliate of the
American Farm Bureau Federation, which filed a 1994 lawsuit seeking to block
reintroduction of gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park. That case resulted
in a recent court order requiring removal of reintroduced Yellowstone wolves.
The government, Defenders of Wildlife and others are appealing the order.
Meanwhile, NMFLB has sued to force removal of the Apache wolves.
A search of the Farm Bureau's web site brings up some wild rhetoric. In an
essay, Montana Farm Bureau Executive Vice President Jake Cummins argues that
environmental leaders "don't care whether the wolves live or die."
Environmentalists just want "to expand federal land use control . . . [in order
to] redistribute wealth by consolidating power in the federal bureaucracy,"
Cummins writes. He suggests that such people still admire "the Communist
ideal." Cummins's grandiloquence may sound over the top, but make no mistake,
the Farm Bureau is far from the political fringes. Although most people may be
only vaguely aware of the organization, an examination of the American Farm
Bureau Federation (AFBF) and its affiliates reveals that this nonprofit
organization is a powerful, persistent and wealthy opponent of environmental
protection and wildlife conservation - an advocate of right-wing causes that
sometimes have little to do with agriculture and at other times may work to the
detriment of the family farmers that AFBF claims to represent.
In a Fortune magazine survey published last December, the American Farm Bureau
Federation ranked 17th among the 25 most powerful special-interest groups in
Washington, just below the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States and
just above the Motion Picture Association of America. It also bested the
American Legion, the National Governors' Association and the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters. The Farm Bureau stood out as one of the best at
manipulating the laws by which we live, the survey said.
With more than 4.7 million members and with affiliated organizations in all 50
states, AFBF wields enormous political power, from Congress to state
legislatures and county commissions. "They are an incredibly powerful lobby,"
says Sam Hitt of Forest Guardians, a Santa Fe, New Mexico, environmental group.
Hitt has run up against the Farm Bureau time and again on such issues as wolf
reintroduction and protection of streamside ecosystems. "Legislators seem to go
google-eyed when they see them walk through the door, and that's caused the
loss of a lot of our wildlife heritage," Hitt says.
Defenders of Wildlife biologist Bob Ferris says, "County supervisors in almost
all rural areas have some connection to the Farm Bureau. That's where a lot of
the decisions about land use and the sorts of things that affect wildlife are
made."
The Chamber of Commerce in Binghamton, New York, set up the first county farm
bureau in 1911 to act as a sponsor for an extension agent provided by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA). From that time through the 1950s, a cozy
relationship developed between the private farm bureaus and USDA agents - a
relationship so close that many farmers mistakenly believed the farm bureaus
and the government were one and the same, according to a history of the Farm
Bureau written by A.V. Krebs. In 1954 USDA ordered an end to its agents'
practice of accepting free office space and gratuities from farm bureaus, but
close connections between the two remained. Ironically, it was this association
with the federal government - and the consequent access to federal crop
programs and technical information - that helped establish AFBF's dominance as
a farmers' organization.
These days, AFBF rails against the intrusiveness of the federal government and
especially against environmental regulations, which AFBF claims are overly
burdensome to farmers. The Endangered Species Act, wetlands laws, the Clean Air
Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and many other laws have pushed American
agriculture to the breaking point, according to AFBF. AFBF's President Dean
Kleckner aims particular criticism at the Food Quality Protection Act, which
directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set standards for
pesticide residues in food at levels low enough to protect the health of
infants and children. "Sane people do wonder what these kids will eat . . .
when the government closes the produce department at our grocery stores,"
Kleckner wrote in a newspaper column in which he suggested that EPA's
"bureaucratic madness" would result in bans on all agricultural chemicals.
Although AFBF calls itself the voice of the American farmer, many of the causes
it champions, including less pesticide regulation, relate as much to the Farm
Bureau's financial interests as to the needs of farmers. The Farm Bureau may
genuinely fear that agriculture will suffer if farmers must reduce their use of
chemicals, but Farm Bureau-affiliated companies own stock in corporations that
manufacture pesticides, and presumably those investments might suffer as well.
According to corporate documents, 63 Farm Bureau-affiliated insurance companies
earn a total of more than $6.5 billion annually in net premiums. The Farm
Bureaus also have investments in banks, mutual-fund companies, financial-
services firms, grain-trading companies and other businesses. Many of those
businesses in turn own stocks in oil and gas, pulp and paper, timber, railroad,
automobile, plastics, steel, chemical, pesticide, communications, electronics
and cigarette companies and even a nuclear power plant. The lists of stocks
owned by Farm Bureau affiliates read like a who's who of corporate
heavyweights: Philip Morris, Weyerhaeuser, Union Carbide, DuPont, AT&T, Ford
Motor, Raytheon (the world's leading manufacturer of tactical missiles), CBS
and many more.
In a recent interview, AFBF Washington lobbyist Dennis Stolte claimed ignorance
of these financial interests and insisted that the insurance and other
businesses have little to do with AFBF. "That's not the Farm Bureau," he said.
"Our members are farmers for the most part. They're people who are interested
in promoting agriculture." Nevertheless, comparisons of the boards of directors
of Farm Bureau-affiliated businesses and Farm Bureau organizations themselves
show substantial overlap. In many cases, the individuals and boards controlling
the businesses also control the state farm bureaus. Frequently, much of the
profit earned by these businesses reverts to the farm bureaus. In one case in
point, the Ohio Farm Bureau reported a profit of $11 million last year.
So vast is this web of interlocking companies with interlocking boards that it
is nearly impossible to estimate the true extent of the Farm Bureau's financial
power. "There's an impression that this is a huge organization of farmers,"
says former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, who now hosts a radio
call-in show. "But they are no more a family farmer organization than is State
Farm Insurance. Just because you have the word farmer in your name doesn't mean
you really represent farmers."
USDA puts the number of full-time American farmers at just over 1 million, so
clearly most of AFBF's 4.7 million members must come from outside of
agriculture. Numbers from the Texas Farm Bureau (TXFB) tell the story. In 1997,
Harris County, which includes metropolitan Houston, had 4,675 members even
though USDA listed only 551 full-time farmers there. Dallas County, with just
229 farmers, registered 2,332 Farm Bureau members.
In fact, most urban members are nothing more than customers of Farm Bureau-
affiliated insurance companies. The Farm Bureau requires these customers to
purchase memberships in order to qualify for low-cost automobile, home, health
or life insurance. These members do not necessarily support or even know about
the Farm Bureau political activities that membership fees and insurance
premiums are bankrolling. Chicago banker Sallyann Garner, for example, became a
Farm Bureau member when she took out an insurance policy in 1991.
Garner says she knew that a membership in the DuPage County, Illinois, Farm
Bureau came with her policy, but she did not realize that all county members
automatically become members of the national organization. Garner learned last
April about AFBF's lawsuit to force removal of the Yellowstone wolves. "Wolf
recovery happens to be one of my pet programs," she says. "I was extremely
upset. I was appalled that I was forced to be a member of the American Farm
Bureau just because of my insurance. I ought to be able to choose insurance
based on the cost and the value and not unwittingly be part of a political
action group that advocates policies I personally object to." A letter to
DuPage County Farm Bureau president Michael Ashby brought a response saying
that if Garner objected to the policy on "Wildlife Pest and Predator Control"
she could vote with her checkbook and find other insurance.
{{<End>}}
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