Washington Farm Bureau Growing
2009 has been a good year for the Washington State Farm Bureau according to President Steve Appel.
APPEL: Actually it has been a very good year for Farm Bureau and I don’t know what to attribute it to other than I might say that people are very concerned about what is going on in this country and they’re turning to Farm Bureau to try to help them answer some of those concerns.
Appel was in the Tri-Cities for their annual meeting and he was excited that Farm Bureau’s numbers in
APPEL: We’ve reached an all-time high with the memberships for Washington Farm Bureau, our 20th year in a row of growth. We’re going to close out our membership year at over 38-thousand members in the state and we’ve grown in all categories of membership across the state this year, so it has been a good year. We have a lot of challenges ahead of us though.
Obviously one of the biggest involves cap & trade. Farm Bureau has said they are not in favor and that has a number of energy groups up in arms. Appel says it’s a member driven issue.
APPEL: We position ourselves as our members tell us what our policy should be. That’s what we’re doing here this week. We sit here, we go over all of our entire policies, every one of them is reconsidered every year and so if the membership changes their opinion, they can change the policy. It’s that simple. I don’t make policy for the organization, our staff doesn’t make policy so if they tell us we are opposed to cap & trade, then we are opposed to cap & trade.
One thing Appel does say though is that eventually all the interested parties are going to have to come to the table and form one consensus.
APPEL: I think you are going to find a circling of the wagons happening pretty rapidly on some of these natural resource issues by the natural resource industries because they recognize – we all recognize that we can’t stand in a divided form, we do that, we’ll be picked off one at a time.
Labor is also a big issue for Washington Farm Bureau and that is another area that is being addressed at this years’ annual convention.
APPEL: Our growers in the central and western part of the state simply cannot get by without and available labor pool, what they want is a legal available labor pool.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
