Farm Bureau Research Articles

82nd State Legislature Regular Session: Summaries of water-related legislative action

Editor’s Note: September 1 of every odd-numbered year is the date that new legislation from the Texas Legislature session that ended the previous spring typically goes into effect. With this in mind, the Texas Water Journal invited five organizations that work closely with the Texas Legislature to provide their take on the changes to Texas water policy and law that were made during the 2011 session. The opinions expressed in these summaries are the opinions of the individual organizations and not the opinion of the Texas Water Journal or the Texas Water Resources Institute. Organizations: • Sierra Club, Lone Star Chapter • Texas Alliance of Groundwater Districts • Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association • Texas Farm Bureau • Texas Water Conservation Association Citation: K Kramer, SA Steinbach, J Skaggs, B Howe, D Robbins. 2011.Commentary: 82nd State Legislature Regular Session: Summaries of water-related legislative action. Texas Water Journal. 2(1):23-38. Available from: https://doi.org/10.21423/twj.v2i1.5886.

"The Secret to a Successful Farm Organization": Township Farm Bureau Women's Clubs in Iowa, 1945–1970

"The Secret to a Successful Farm Organization": Township Farm Bureau Women's Clubs in Iowa, 1945–1970

The changing role of agriculture in tobacco control policymaking: A South Carolina case study

To document the behavior of tobacco manufacturers' agricultural third-party allies in South Carolina from the 1970s through 2009, we analyzed news reports, public documents and internal tobacco industry documents and conducted interviews with knowledgeable individuals. We found that agriculture-based interest groups (the Farm Bureau), elected state agency heads (Commissioners of Agriculture) and tobacco-area legislators acted as an iron triangle containing strong third-party allies of tobacco manufacturers from the 1970s through the 1990 s. The Farm Bureau and Commissioners of Agriculture reacted to national-level changes in the tobacco leaf market structure by shifting towards a neutral position on tobacco control, while some tobacco-area legislators remained manufacturer allies (Sullivan, Barnes, & Glantz, 2009). This shift was reinforced by public health outreach and successes, which were in turn facilitated by the lack of opposition from agricultural groups. We conclude that public health advocates in tobacco-growing states should use the pragmatic shift of agricultural groups' position to challenge remaining third-party manufacturer alliances and agriculture-based opposition to tobacco control policies.

The New USDA: Cultivating Change

In proclaiming the week of August 23–29 National Community Gardening Week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack noted, “Community gardens provide numerous benefits including opportunities for local food production, resource conservation, and neighborhood beautification. But they also promote family and community interaction and enhance opportunities to eat healthy, nutritious foods. Each of these benefits is something we can and should strive for.” Vilsack’s statement was the latest in a string of signals in the past 7 months that suggest significant changes are afoot at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). On 29 July 2009 Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan inaugurated a new rooftop garden at the offices of the USDA Economic Research Service. In early spring, Vilsack “broke pavement” for a vegetable garden known as the People’s Garden, which was planted in front of USDA headquarters across from the National Mall. And a March 2009 planning meeting to discuss the People’s Garden and other sustainability initiatives, chaired by Vilsack, included people not typically seen at USDA meetings in the past: representatives from community garden associations, local food policy councils, botanical gardens, and the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit organization in Pennsylvania dedicated to organic farming research. Vilsack “talked about sustainability, linking agriculture, food, and human health in a way that you haven’t heard [from USDA],” recalls Rose Hayden-Smith, a fellow at the Minneapolis-based nonprofit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and master gardener for the California Cooperative Extension service.

Exploring goal‐setting as a tool for leadership development

AbstractGoal‐setting theory is based on the premise that conscious goals affect action and is supported by four decades of research and more than 1,000 scholarly publications. Although the theory has been widely applied in management settings, it is an underused framework in the broader field of leadership development. This study considers the effects of goal‐setting as applied in a leadership program conducted for local board members in a nonprofit membership organization, the Florida Farm Bureau Federation. A final reduced regression model explains about 25% of the variance in individual performance by considering goal specificity, goal difficulty, education level, and gender. This study has implications for professional development programming and its application of goal‐setting theory. Additional research is needed to explore further the application of goal‐setting theory in programming for volunteer leaders.

History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 65 History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South. Edited by Gordon E. Harvey, Richard D. Starnes, and Glenn Feldman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. xii, 224 pp. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8173-1507-1. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-81735320 -8. Edited by three of his former graduate students, History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie is, as the subtitle makes clear, a tribute to the scholarship and activism of Wayne Flynt. Flynt, as surely all readers of The Alabama Review know, taught at Auburn University for many years and is still an extremely productive and important historian of Alabama and the South. He has coauthored a history of Alabama and published three books of his own on the state—Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa, 1989), Alabama Baptists (Tuscaloosa, 1998), and most recently, Alabama in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa, 2004). His studies of poor whites and seminal articles establishing the existence of a social gospel tradition within white southern Protestantism constitute his most important contributions to the historiography of the South. They add needed complexity to historians’ understanding of its past. Although the editors’ introduction discusses and a few of the other essays mention Flynt’s scholarship, the book devotes far more attention to Flynt’sactivism.FlynthasspokentocountlesscivicgroupsacrossAlabama, written editorials for many of the state’s local newspapers, and organized or joined a host of reform organizations and efforts in Alabama. He served as a court-appointed mediator in the battle for equity in school funding and later campaigned to have his and other churches voluntarily pay property taxes to support public education, reasoning that supporting quality public education will not radically restructure power, but it can make a tremendous difference in the lives of many people. Flynt’s efforts in behalf of education and for reform of Alabama’s outdated constitution , another cause he has championed, illustrate his commitment to social justice and to a pragmatic approach to concrete social reform. Essays by fellow scholars John Shelton Reed and Dan T. Carter and by fellow activists Dewayne Key and Bailey Thomson discuss Flynt’s reform efforts; they are justly celebratory but brief. Readers seeking to understand Flynt’s values and motives, rooted in his deep Baptist faith, should also read Flynt’s own admirably matter-of-fact but extremely interesting discussion of his career in John B. Boles’s Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History (Athens, Ga., 2001). T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 66 In addition to the essays praising Flynt’s activism, History and Hope includes essays on various aspects of southern history by seven of his former graduate students, who make clear their respect and affection for their former teacher. The editors and essayists try to relate these essays to Flynt’s scholarship, but his students’ approach seems to differ in subtle ways. Flynt the social activist has fought the historical ills of Alabama and the South; Flynt the scholar, though, has tended to focus more on signs of hope—the strength of the poor whites’ culture and the existence of a reformist impulse within southern white Protestantism, for examples. Some of the essays in History and Hope find similar signs of hope; others, though, analyze the region’s shortcomings. And although Flynt has been a consistent and courageous voice for racial equality, his books and articles have not focused on race; five of the seven essays by his students do. Perhaps the essay that most closely follows Flynt’s own work as a scholar is Richard D. Starnes’s discussion of a limited but nonetheless vibrant and important social consciousness among North Carolina Baptists in the early twentieth century. Jeff Frederick’s analysis of the influence of interest groups on Alabama politics from 1929 to 1971, which has an interesting discussion of the efforts of the Farm Bureau but surprisingly little to say about those of industrialists, seems to build more on Flynt’s activism than his scholarship. The other essays address disparate topics, but all acknowledge...

Guestworkers,Enganchadores, and Changing Labor Relations in U.S. Rural Communities

IntroductionIn a two-month time span early in 2007, North Carolina's Beaufort County Commission approved two measures directed against the growing Latino population in the county, voting first to remove all non-English language materials from county offices and following with a vote to approve the County Sheriff's cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to locate and deport undocumented immigrants. Around the same time, the New York Times reported on a case of excessive exploitation among two Thai guestworkers in North Carolina and Louisiana, the Southern Poverty Law Center (2007) released a report entitled, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, and National Public Radio aired at least two stories addressing immigration issues. In the week between the New York Times article and the release of Close to Slavery, the cooperative extension service of Johnston County, North Carolina, hosted a panel to address agricultural labor issues, inviting representatives of the North Carolina and U.S. Departments of Labor, the Employment Security Commission, North Carolina Department of Labor, the Farm Bureau, and, most notably, the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA). This last organization is one of the largest labor contracting organizations in the United States, specializing in the placement of H-2 workers; in 2004, the NCGA signed an agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee on the condition that law suits against them be dropped. Farmers from across the North Carolina's coastal plain attended, and the issue of pending immigration reform legislation generated the most heated debate. Not insignificantly, much of this focus on immigration occurred around the time that President Bush toured Latin America and, in Mexico, again raised the issue of immigration reform.These local, regional, and national events and reports illustrate the varied dimensions of immigration and its pervasiveness across the North American social and cultural landscape, underscoring the point that the United States is ripe for immigration reform. Several legislative initiatives include some form of expansion of the current H-2 programs-the nation's current guestworker programs-although these vary according to such things as how guestworkers' wages would be determined, whether or not employers would provide housing, guestworkers' access to the courts, protections workers would receive, and other factors. Much of this legislation has been crafted as if ignorant of the ways the H-2 programs have evolved (or devolved) since the last major immigration reform in 1986, despite widely publicized works like Close to Slavery and other, less widely read work (e.g. North South Institute 2006; Wilkinson 1989; Hahamovich 2003; Griffith 2006; Smart 1997). These works nearly always find that H-2 programs, primarily because of the provision that H-2 workers are bound to one and only one employer, have a tendency to deteriorate over time, approximating highly exploitative labor contracting practices like indentured servitude.In this paper, I examine practices that are common in the nation's current H-2 programs and in labor contracting generally, relating them to other developments in immigration taking place in the rural U.S. South.1 Drawing on research conducted in rural North Carolina regions from 2001 to the present, as well as case studies of immigration into Georgia, Iowa, and Minnesota, I suggest that, as labor relations in guestworker programs deteriorate, people participating in H-2 programs have been able to resist the excessive labor control that has been structured into the program. They accomplish this, usually, by working outside of their contracts, in jobs that they are not legally contracted to accept. At times they access these jobs with the assistance of their legal employers and at times against their employers' wishes or without their employers' knowledge. The maturing of Latino communities in new destinations across the United States, a process bolstered by several public and private U. …

Options for the Economic Health of Farmers, Farmers Markets and Communities: Homebased Fruit and Vegetable Microprocessing

Kentucky passed farmer friendly legislation in 2003 allowing farmers to process value added food products in their home kitchens with the emphasis on community economic development and farm to table concepts. A unique partnership between the University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service, Kentucky Cabinet for Health Services, Kentucky Department of Agriculture, and Farm Bureau allows farmers to sell home canned foods from the farm, farmers market, or certified roadside stand. The value-added products must contain a fruit, vegetable, or nut grown by the Kentucky processor. Farmers processing low risk products simply register. Over 289 farms in Kentucky are selling items such as pumpkin bread, blueberry jam, and pear preserves. To produce low acid or acidified products, farmers must attend a workshop, have recipes approved by a process authority, develop a label, and make application for a fee. Over 200 farmers have been trained with 36 farmers producing diverse products such as salsa, pickled squash, and corn relish. These products allow farmers to add economic value to their raw produce, reduce waste, and use blemished but otherwise quality produce. Extending the selling season allows the opportunity to strengthen the farm to table link within the community. Without the large capital outlay of a permitted kitchen, farmers can also find which products may be successful for commercial market venues. Data indicates farmers are promoting these concepts within their communities by going beyond traditional marketing of fresh produce and participating in homebased microprocessing to promote value-added products

A GREAT TIME TO MAKE FERTILIZERS

FERTILIZER PRODUCERS in the U.S. and Canada are glowing as demand for their products soars. The increase in demand, however, is not coming from growers of crops destined for traditional food and animal feed markets but rather for the fermentation of corn into fuel-grade ethanol. A survey of 86,000 farmers by the Department of Agriculture determined that growers will plant about 90.5 million acres of corn this year, 14% more than in 2006. The American Farm Bureau Federation is a little more cautious in its projection, predicting only an approximately 10% increase in planted corn acreage. Whatever the increase, it's significant for a crop for which planted acreage actually declined at an average annual rate of 0.1% between 1996 and 2006. Last year, planted acreage was at its lowest point since 2001—78.3 million acres—as higher costs cut into planting. Harvested corn acreage also declined in 2006, falling about 6.0% from ...

Initiation of Farm Safety Programs in the Arkansas Delta: A Case Study of Participatory Methods

Outreach to high-risk communities is one of the goals of Area Health Education Centers. One such population is the farm community, which is known to suffer high rates of traumatic events. To describe a participatory methods initiative by the Arkansas Delta Area Health Education Center and other agencies to address farm-related health hazards in a 7-county region. Regional injury and fatality data were gathered from sources including Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation insurance claims, the Arkansas Statistical Service Phone Survey, the National Agricultural Statistics Service, and the Cooperative Extension Service Division of Agriculture at the University of Arkansas. Focus groups were held to assess farmer perceptions and recommendations. Accidents involving tractors accounted for 42% of deaths, and accidents with crop-spraying aircraft accounted for 36%. Focus group participants agreed that planting and harvesting seasons were particularly dangerous. Recommendations included educating motorists to be more cautious on agricultural area roads, using local farmers to provide farm safety training, and making safety equipment more available.

Native Soil: A History of the DeKalb County Farm Bureau

Native Soil: A History of the DeKalb County Farm Bureau

The Apple Bites Back: Claiming Old Orchards for Residential Development

As the U.S. population continues to grow, increasing demand for housing and related community resources means more land is being converted from agricultural uses to residential applications. According to the revised 1997 National Resources Inventory conducted by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, more than 6 million acres of American farmland were converted to developed uses between 1992 and 1997. That is an annual conversion rate of roughly 1.2 million acres per year—a 51% increase over the average annual rate reported for the preceding decade. Naturally, many of these areas were routinely treated with pesticides and other chemicals during their agricultural lifetimes. Although this legacy has been problematic in a wide variety of land conversion scenarios, one in particular seems to have attracted the attention and concern of environmental officials and property buyers in several states across the country: the residential development of historic orchard properties. In state after state, these old orchards (which most often produced apples, but also peaches, cherries, pears, and other tree crops) are metamorphosing into highly desirable subdivisions—desirable, that is, until it emerges that the soil beneath the feet of the proud new residents may be contaminated with lead and arsenic. These toxic by-products are left from the days before DDT and before organophosphates, when arsenical pesticides, particularly lead arsenate (LA), were the treatment of choice to prevent the ravages of insect damage.

LOCAL FARM BUREAU LEADERSHIP NEEDS ASSESSMENT: A QUALITATIVE STUDY

The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine the leadership expectations, needs, and interests of local Farm Bureau board members. Nine county boards were included in the study, with the chairperson and one other member being interviewed from each board. The focus of the interviews was identification of common leadership-related challenges and perceived development needs of the local Farm Bureau board. Four significant theme areas emerged: organizational appreciation, grassroots involvement, board member training, and board member succession. Within these areas, twelve consistent sub-themes surfaced and are discussed in this paper. Based on these results, the researchers recommended that Florida Farm Bureau: (1) maintain quality field staff as liaisons between the local and state levels; (2) encourage and support district-level leadership programs; (3) develop and facilitate “short courses” on Farm Bureau board governance; (4) design and coordinate new board member orientation programs; (5) expand recognition programs for local board involvement; and (6) continue research efforts that guide local leadership development. Other groups that desire improved local board leadership should consider research efforts similar to this study and the related research with Florida Farm Bureau.

Special Collections to Digitize Historic Tobacco and Crop Science Materials

Thanks to support from the North Carolina Farm Bureau, the North Carolina Tobacco Foundation, and the North Carolina Research Commission, the NCSU Libraries' Special Collections Research Center will construct, enhance, and maintain the “Living Off the Land” Web site. The site will provide digital access to collections of rare and unique items on tobacco and crop science history in North Carolina dating from 1850 through 1950. Tobacco has figured prominently not only in the economy of the state, but also in its culture, from colonial times to the present. Agricultural history is a frequent area of interest for researchers and visitors alike to North Carolina's cultural repositories. Completion of this project will result in expanded access to the resources available for the study of the state's tobacco and crop science history.

Utah Prairie Dogs: Creative Strategies to De-list a Problematic Endangered Species

Author(s): Frey, Nicole; Messmer, Terry; Elmore, Dwayne | Abstract: The Utah prairie dog (UPD) was listed as “endangered” in 1973; it was down-listed to “threatened” in 1984. Regulatory agencies have realized that protecting and promoting UPD on federal lands alone is not efficient. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and private landowners desire a shift in the current recovery strategy in order to remove the threatened status of UPD as well as provide for management of UPD damage to private property. The time is right to begin a creative management strategy. One suggested new strategy would combine population counts of UPD living on private and public lands toward the recovery goal, as part of the new recovery plan. A survey of agricultural producers in the region with UPD revealed that 70% of the producers feared working with the USFWS on sensitive species issues, because of possible restrictions to their production. To date, the majority of producers would not be interested in creating conservation easements or safe harbors on their property. However, they are willing to work with local Extension agents and the Utah Farm Bureau to create solutions. Therefore, the first step to trying a new approach to UPD recovery will be to foster trust between local producers and regulatory agencies. New programs will focus on building trust, just compensation for losses, stewardship of the land and community, and cooperation.

Marketing Performance of Oklahoma Farmers

Relative to marketing most agricultural commodities, the dominant academic paradigm is the efficient market hypothesis that suggests that little profits can be made by trying to time when to sell wheat. The paradigm says that farmers will, on average, receive an average price. A view that has been expounded at Cooperative Extension meetings and in farm press articles is that most farmers receive a below average market price. For example, at a recent Farm Bureau meeting, the master of ceremonies made the statement, “producers tend to sell on the bottom third of the market.” Also, in a mid-March 2001 issue of the Progressive Farmer ,D r. G.A. Barnaby from Kansas State University was quoted as saying, “Maybe that’s why most farmers sell in the bottom third of the market” (Batchelor, p. 25). 1 The research question then is do farmers really sell in the bottom third of the market or is this just a clever marketing gimmick by market advisory services? The idea of farmers selling in the bottom third of the market is not without theoretical foundation. Results from behavioral finance find that people have systematic psychological biases (Brorsen and Anderson). These biases could result in herding behavior in such a way that the majority could always be wrong. A study by Slusher, based on a narrow survey of Indiana corn farmers and conducted in 1986, is the only one that we know of that has addressed the issue of actual farmer perfor

Survey of Health Needs and Concerns of Rural Pennsylvanians

Introduction: This survey was undertaken to determine the most important health and safety needs of farmers and rural citizens of Pennsylvania. Methods: In June of 2004, a one-page questionnaire was distributed by mail to 32,700 members of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau as an attachment to their monthly newsletter. Results: The lack of affordable health care insurance was overwhelmingly cited as the most important unmet health care need (73%). No other issue was chosen by more than 10 percent of respondents. This lack of affordable health insurance was also cited as the most important health or safety problem to be addressed in the respondent's communities (71%). When asked the most important health or safety problem affecting them as individuals or their community, the respondents chose “no major problem or need” as the most frequent response (46%). The issue of affordable health insurance was not an option for this question. The predominant concern regarding the lack of affordable health insurance was consistent across all regions of the Commonwealth and for farmers as well as residents of all community sizes sampled. Discussion: This study would indicate that the lack of affordable health insurance is the preeminent health and safety issue for many Pennsylvania farmers and rural citizens.

Communication Preferences of Politically Active Agricultural Leaders

Agricultural associations and advocacy organizations have begun to use the Internet to establish more effective online grassroots help for lobbying efforts, yet little research has been conducted to ascertain communications technology preferences and willingness of members to use the Internet as a communications tool. To address this issue, a descriptive survey was mailed to a purposive sample (N= 814) of members holding leadership positions in the Florida Farm Bureau; 268 members responded to the survey, for an overall response rate of 33%. Respondents used communication technologies frequently, expressed competence in basic technology procedures, and actively communicated with elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels. Respondents indicated that they preferred to receive and send information through the mail, and that they were most inclined to take a strong role in communicating with officials when policies negatively impacting agriculture were being considered. Respondents felt that e-mail would be an adequate substitute for some forms of communication but were less likely to say that e-mail would be a good substitute for more personal methods of communication, such as telephone conversations or face-to-face meetings. These findings suggest that where it is important to communicate en masse rapidly, the online method may have advantages. However, a “one-way-fits-all” online method of communicating with elected officials may not be the most effective communication method; more personal ways of communicating, especially at the local and state levels, may still be best for some issues.

"Quite a Ripple But No Revolution": the Changing Roles of Women in the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, 1921-1951

"Quite a Ripple But No Revolution": the Changing Roles of Women in the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, 1921-1951

Cooperative Partnership Between California Regional Water Quality Control Board and Imperial County Farm Bureau Creates Positive Results in TMDL Implementation

Cooperative Partnership Between California Regional Water Quality Control Board and Imperial County Farm Bureau Creates Positive Results in TMDL Implementation