Nearly 150 Indiana Farm Bureau members met in Indianapolis on Wednesday for an educational session before having lunch with around 75 state legislators to highlight agricultural priorities for this year’s General Assembly.
“Our priorities this year are taxes and water,” says Andy Tauer, INFB’s Executive Director of Public Policy. “From a tax perspective, looking to those property taxes, getting some overall assurances for our members that can do some long term planning, looking at that farmland formula, how we can fix that. On the water side, we want to make sure we’ve got some protections for agriculture, some additional groundwater monitoring so we truly know what the resource is that we’re protecting.”
With this being a budget year, there are many things they could get bogged down with, but the message to members is to stay focused on the priorities.
“There’s so much going on this upcoming General Assembly- 14 new members of the legislature, a new administration- we need to stay focused on those priorities, and then as we get those into a good place, we’ll start to look at some of the other issues that impact agriculture.”
Tauer says a lot of attention gets paid to bills that get passed, but he says he and the INFB public policy team will be monitoring each and every bill coming through each chamber to make sure nothing detrimental to Farm Bureau members gets by them. He credits the public policy team for their relentless work during this time.
Tauer and the entire Indiana Farm Bureau team encourage farmers to make their presence known at the Statehouse during the legislative session.
“That member engagement, that grassroots engagement, is so critical to the success we have statewide.”
To learn how you can get involved, visit infarmbureau.org or contact your local county Farm Bureau.
