Farm Bureau honors Alabama Farmers Federation

The American Farm Bureau Federation recently honored the Alabama Farmers Federation, bestowing eight  awards on the Alabama organization at the recent AFBF annual meeting in Phoenix.

The Alabama Farmers Federation received awards for education and outreach, leadership development, member benefits and initiatives, policy development and implementation, and public relations and communications, the Alabama organization said in a news release.

The state group also received President’s Awards among large membership states for education and outreach and for public relations and communications – two of the areas most important to agriculture, AFBF President Zippy Duvall said.

“We must help consumers understand that we all want the same things – a safe and plentiful food supply for our national security and for the health of our families and our children; a strong farm economy, agriculture supports 17 million American jobs; a wide range of food choices, whether organic, conventional, genetically modified," Duvall said, according to the release.

“We have a great story to tell. We need to take back the concept of sustainability because nobody is working harder to be sustainable than America’s farmers and ranchers,” he said.

Duvall recently expressed his support for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the EPA in a recent letter to Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-WY) and ranking member Tom Carper (D-DE). In the letter, Duvall recounted how Scott Pruitt contested of the EPA’s Waters of the U.S. rule “(defending) bipartisan view of Congress that the agency has illegally overstepped its bounds and ignored the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The letter also referenced Pruitt’s work to “defend” Congress over the Clean Power Plan by taking the position “that Congress has not authorized the sweeping attempt by EPA to coerce action by the states.”

In the letter, Duvall also stated, “In recent years, farmers and ranchers have suffered under burdensome, unnecessary and, too often, unlawful federal regulations promulgated by the EPA."