Awards for Save Family Farming Pt 2

I'm Bob Larson. As we told you yesterday, the Washington State Dairy Federation AND Washington Farm Bureau have recognized the group established to combat an attack on small farmers by the What's Upstream campaign.

Save Family Farming's Executive Director Gerald Baron says people are being misled and their job is to educate ...

GERALD BARON ... "But, our role is not lobbying, our role is to reach out to the public, especially the environmentally oriented urbanite, the younger voter who places a high priority on the environment, and certainly most people in our state do. So what they need to understand, which is really not being well-communicated to them yet, is that farmers are doing an outstanding job of environmental stewardship. There's so many good things going on and those urban voters who have gotten so far away from the farms and from their food sources need to know what farmers are doing."

But, Baron says, What's Upstream and other anti-farming groups aren't likely to go away any time soon ...

GERALD BARON ... "Well, to some degree, it may seem like the pressure may be coming off a little bit.

Certainly, in our state government, there are major concerns, but coming from the extremist anti-farming groups, we expect new attacks and the farm community needs to be prepared for that and needs to be able to respond aggressively to those kinds of attacks."

The state Public Disclosure Commission gave What's Upstream until Thursday to respond to claims it misused federal EPA funds.