A Union for Farmers
The “union” for farmers is supposed to be the American Farm Bureau Federation, better known as the Farm Bureau. There are branches in every state and Puerto Rico, and the local branches do try to help their farmers.
But when you get to the top of the heap, the central Farm Bureau, it all falls apart. The American Farm Bureau Federation, supposedly the main lobbyist and support for American farmers, in fact stiffs the farmer in favor of the Big Ag corporations.
Do these Big Ag corporations pay off the Farm Bureau? It is very hard to say, because the Farm Bureau does not tell you who donates to it. It is a 501c5 organization, for which its donors cannot claim a tax deduction, but they are able to retain their privacy. The Farm Bureau does not even have to tell the government the identity of its donors.
Here is a screenshot from its 2022 tax return. If the Farm Bureau was a 501c3, it would have to name its contributors, but instead, as a 501c5, that information is RESTRICTED:
How much does Farm Bureau pay its President, Zippy Duvall? In 2022, he earned over $600,000. Below you can see the Farm Bureau’s 2022 tax return and how much its top officers were paid. Add columns D and F together for the total amount of compensation.
The individual state branches of the Farm Bureau are nonprofits, but own for-profit insurance companies that market their policies to their farmer members, and sometimes the branches own other companies. The Iowa Farm Bureau is sitting on a nest egg worth $1.7 Billion dollars from its insurance company ownership.
The American Farm Bureau Federation employs a couple of dozen lobbyists, but they often lobby against their small farmer members’ interests, and in favor of CAFOs, federally subsidized crop insurance (which disproportionately subsidizes the largest farms and which they themselves make a profit from)–and the Farm Bureau lobbied against California’s bill to prevent animal cruelty.
The upshot is that the Farm Bureau is both captured, and has its own interests to look out for, which are often opposite to the interests of individual farmers. There is no major entity in Washington DC that is effectively looking out for the needs of small farmers. This is probably why federal policies in recent decades have harmed farming in America.
Sources
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/whose-side-american-farm-bureau
