Farmers urged to gear up lobbying effort regarding Farm Bill changes

In a recent American Farm Bureau Federation podcast, AFBF Senior Director of Congressional Relations Mary Kay Thatcher discussed the importance of farmers and ranchers taking advantage of the resources available to them to lobby for Farm Bill considerations.

“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,” Thatcher said. “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.”

She also discussed the need for farm bureau members to coordinate on a state level to determine their concerns for the Farm Bill, many of which the AFBF has broken down online to help building member understanding.

“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,” Thatcher said. “Once we know the concerns we can spend some time analyzing different options and figuring out what farmers need to make a good decision.”