Farm Bureau Resources will Help Farmer Engagement in Farm Bill

farm-bill-resources

2018-farm-bill-logoFarm bill resources are now available from the American Farm Bureau Federation. AFBF Senior Director of Congressional Relations, Mary Kay Thatcher, says now is the time to consider and recommend farm bill policies.

“The House and Senate Ag Committees have both been very clear that they’re going to start listening sessions in the country and hearings in Washington, so we need to be engaged now, or it will be too late. And I think farmers need to understand that it would be a very bad idea to split the nutrition title off from the rest of the farm programs because that’s the way that we get the farm bill passed.”

That’s why AFBF has those farm bill resources for farmers now available online.

Mary-Kay-Thatcher-618x400“You can get to it by FB.org/farmbillresources. So, go on there, see what kind of topics you’re interested in, often times they come with a pretty nice graph and maps to help you understand the issues even better and there are some videos and lots of resources on that website.”

Thatcher said the idea is for members to use the information to build their own policy suggestions.

“We have a lot of people that haven’t had their state annual meetings yet and feeding into that process so that when we come up to the AFBF annual meeting in January we have good strong policy telling us what the biggest concerns are. Once we know the concerns we can spend some time analyzing different options and figuring out what farmers need to make a good decision.”

AFBF President Zippy Duvall appointed a group of 16 state Farm Bureau staff members and two AFBF staff to serve on a Farm Bill Working Group. The Working Group’s charge is to examine the issues, information gaps and analysis needs to ensure farmers are ready to engage in the development of a new farm bill. Katrina Hall with Indiana Farm Bureau is a member of that group.

That website again is fb.org/farmbillresources.

Source: AFBF

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