Using Your Voice

Using Your Voice

Regardless of which state you reside in — your legislators are reviewing bills that will in some way affect your daily life and your business. Are you paying attention? In the last several weeks, Oregon’s agricultural advocates have been attempting to explain to their legislators how a minimum wage increase would affect them personally as well as the ag industry as a whole. Sometimes, it feels like an individual can’t make a difference.
Roger Rickard who recently spoke at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Young Farmers and Ranchers Leadership Conference shared some sage advice to those who are willing to go to their state and to the national capitol to advocate about issues affecting agriculture.
Rickard: “When you go to meet with them and you go to interact and you want to advocate and you want to talk about your key issues — they aren’t going to hurt you. They need to know. They want to know. They want you to participate in that process with them because they want to know how to make the right decision. The only way they can do that is by you going out there and telling them about the issues that affect you and how they affect YOU.”
He reminds us that we as citizens can be as effective as lobbyists about an issue.
Rickard: “You as the citizen holds the keys, you as the individual have the right to go out and do everything that a lobbyist does and actually do it more effectively. You are one of their constituents — they work for you.”
 
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