Catching Up with Croplife America
Catching Up with Croplife America. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
Crop protection. No, not hiring bodyguards to stand in your fields but a means of protecting crops from pests, weeds, disease and theft. Jay Vroom is the President and CEO for Croplife America.
VROOM: Croplife America is a trade association, a not-for-profit organization that is supported by about 80 individual firms ranging from the 6 largest multi-national crop protection and crop bio-technology and innovation companies down to smaller niche companies that are still manufacturers but target a lot of minor use small acreage crop opportunities for pest control and pest management for farmers. Our principal reason for being is to aid the industry in government relations
That means they spend a lot of time as advocates and lobbyists for the industry.
VROOM: I would say the most important thing we do is help the industry figure out what the issues are that supersede the entire industry, individual companies interests and find those core principals that are of importance to the industry to either propose to government to undertake or to hopefully prevent the government from doing at times.
Vroom was in the keynote speaker at the annual Far West Agribusiness Associations Washington Winter Conference. I asked Vroom about his address.
VROOM: Well, about the importance of being involved for agriculture to have our people participate in elections, to participate in public policy processes. There are a lot of us in Washington that are lobbying on behalf of modern agriculture we’re the sort of advocates that are there inside the Beltway and if we don’t have the support of people like members of the Far West Association here and across the country, the grass roots aren’t involved then we don’t have any credibility and bad things happen to agriculture so just being involved. Also from an election standpoint, while we are few in number, fewer than 2-million active, full-time farmers in the United States there are millions of the rest of us that also work with farmers and have a vested interest in good policy and elections of people who will be able to listen and understand what we are talking about.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
