A close reading of American Farm Bureau history calls into question who the organization is really working for.
Much of rural America in the 21st century has been wracked by economic devastation. Small towns with shuttered main streets, failing industries, and fledgling services. The bucolic small farm is more of a story than a reality, with farmland consolidated into ever larger operations. Livestock and crop production has industrialized and markets have concentrated, compromising the economic vitality of the small to mid-sized farm. This has led to a mass exodus of folks to the city as opportunity dries up. For those left, the desolation has fomented a surge in reactionary politics lashing out at urban America.
Rural America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries suffered similar problems. Big business squeezed small farm families, resulting in widespread destitution and discontent. The banks and the railroads used their monopoly power to drain money from small towns, hampering prosperity. These are the same forces undermining economic success in modern-day rural America; however, the response of rural residents was far different compared to today.
Instead of lashing out in a reactionary manner, they once organized. A number of rural movements, such as The Grange and the Farmers Alliance, were founded to target big business and build economic power. Cooperatives were established to cut out intermediaries, and political mandates to break monopoly power were forged at the ballot box. Grassroots movements confronting corrupt mortgage lenders and organizing strikes were common during economic crises. Unions were established to protect tenants and farm workers.
These two versions of rural America could not be starker in their differences. Rural Americans of yesteryear pursued solidarity and popular movements that directly confronted those extracting their wealth. The same cannot be said about rural America today. What happened here? Some clues can be found by tracing the history of America’s largest farm organization — Farm Bureau.
The Farm Bureau (or, more accurately, American Farm Bureau Federation) was a latecomer to agrarian political organizing, founded in 1919. The Bureau quickly sought to distinguish itself from its more populist peers, such as the National Farmers Union, by taking a less economically ambitious position. According to Stewart Truelsen, author of Forward Farm Bureau, an exhaustive history of the organization, the federation sought “equality” within agriculture. But this was not between capital and labor, or the landed and the landless. The Bureau sought equality between agriculture and other industries — the banks, the railroads, and the oil drillers. For agriculture to join the ranks of the industrial giants.
Robert Howard, son of the first Bureau president James Howard, described the organization’s founding members in a biography of his father as “upper-middle class landowners” seeking to establish a program to elevate agriculture to the halls of power. For farming to be recognized as a prestige industry in the United States. To become a properly big business, helmed by men like themselves.
Despite early clashes with their more reformist peers, the Bureau initially supported a decidedly populist agenda. According to Truelsen, they were instrumental in the passage of the Packers and Stockyards Act, which fought against monopolistic practices and price manipulation that starved livestock farmers of revenue. They also pursued futures regulations and credit reform that reduced speculation on commodities and made low-interest loans available to farmers, improving prices and lowering the cost of investment.
Their interest in promoting cooperatives in rural America provides a marked contrast to today. In the first flexing of their legislative might, the Bureau pushed Congress during the 1920s to pass a law exempting farm co-ops from anti-trust regulation, a win that would allow farmers to pool their economic power and command lower prices for inputs and higher prices for their products. Around the same time, the Bureau also attempted to establish a national grain marketing enterprise called U.S. Grain Growers Inc., which would have placed American grain production under the democratic control of producers.
The Bureau sought equality between agriculture and other industries — the banks, the railroads, and the oil drillers.
These early policy wins, coupled with the economic devastation of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, laid the groundwork for a surge in Bureau membership. In 1934, membership swelled 36% over the previous year, and the organization reached the 1 million mark by 1946, according to Bureau records.
While their legislative agenda certainly drew in members, they had another strategy for filling the rolls. Many local county extension workers pushed for farmers to join their local chapter of the Farm Bureau. This process was encouraged by government agencies and agricultural colleges. Because of their connection with universities and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the early Bureau was closely aligned with the “scientific agriculture” of the day.
In this era, scientific agriculture was associated with pricey new technologies, such as mechanization and modern fertilizers, with practitioners generally being highly capitalized individuals. This alignment, along with stiff dues, propelled the membership to consist of wealthier farmers, the only ones who could afford to invest in this expensive production model. This led the organization to have a philosophical orientation that diverged from mainstream political thought in rural America. Promotion from government agents, which persisted since the Bureau was seen as nonpartisan, put the organization at an advantage over competing entities such as the National Farmers Union, who needed to expend more effort towards recruitment.
The Bureau’s first decidedly pro-business act occurred during the Great Depression. In response to the lack of action among political and business leaders in addressing the collapsing farm economy, Iowa Farmers Union leader Milo Reno organized a farmer strike that froze supply purchases and crop sales, launched roadblocks, and held “penny sales” at the auctions of foreclosed farms where prospective buyers were discouraged by the crowd from placing bids. According to Truelsen, this strategy allowed the community to purchase the farm for pennies, returning the land to their original owners. According to Truelsen, this movement of rural solidarity and power-building intimidated the wealthier Bureau members, who petitioned county leaders to break the strike, according to Truelsen. As New Deal policies came into effect, farmer ire was mollified and the strike movement faded into history.
As the 1950s came along, the Bureau’s core mission evolved from supporting the control of overproduction to embracing as much production as possible, according to Truelsen. The Bureau lobbied for a host of policies, from expansive trade agreements to the Food for Peace program, which saw American agricultural production shipped to all corners of the globe. Instead of managing overproduction, the strategy of this era was to shove every calorie of output into any market the government could create on behalf of farmers.
Promotion from government agents the organization at an advantage over competing entities such as the National Farmers Union.
One of the most significant moves towards this end was The Wheat Referendum of 1963. In this watershed moment, wheat farmers were tasked to decide whether they wanted to continue New Deal-era production controls that kept grain prices high and small farmers solvent. Farm Bureau members generally voted to end the program. While this move only applied to one commodity, it was the first step in the dismantling of the New Deal and signaled a major shift towards enshrining overproduction as the guiding star of American agricultural policy, with Farm Bureau members at the helm.
As price supports and production limits were lifted, the oversupply problem led to the return of price instability. Larger farms could weather this situation due to economies of scale, allowing them to make healthy profits on slimmer margins. The smaller farmers were left to the wind, barely hanging on with lower revenues in an industry more reliant on expensive machinery and inputs. Then came the “Get big or get out” era. Every Farm Bill to come out of this period was shaped by Bureau lobbying.
The death blow to the small family farm in the United States came with the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. Thirty years of policy towards dismantling the agrarian social safety net came to a head when a glut of grain driven by shrinking export markets, coupled with high interest rates to combat inflation, cut cash flow to rural America. Oversupply reared its ugly head, leading to millions of farm family balance sheets to tilt to the red. Rural banks and small businesses began closing as farms went bankrupt. The populations of many towns were decimated.
Many actions were proposed by members, including a farmer strike, which Bureau leadership declined to put to a vote, according to Truelsen. They also passed on promoting a plan for a moratorium on foreclosures because it was “unfair for those who made payments on time,” according to a transcript from the Bureau’s 1985 annual meeting. Their only serious proposal was a debt restructuring plan that would reorganize principal and interest payment schedules. While this allowed farmers some breathing room, it did nothing for families that had already lost everything.
The organization’s “failure to recognize the farm debt crisis increases a view that the Farm Bureau is an organization of big, wealthy farmers.”
During this period, many former allies of the Bureau broke away. The Des Moines Register agriculture editor Don Muhm, who generally favored the Bureau in his coverage, penned a story titled “Farm Bureau Chief Downplays Ag Crisis‘” after then-President Bob Delano stated that the crisis ‘only’ impacted grain farmers. The Bureau’s public relations were not helped by the fact that Delano sent this quote from the organization’s annual meeting at a luxury resort in Hawaii. Congressman Cooper Evans (R-Iowa), another ardent supporter, said in an interview with the Register that the organization’s “failure to recognize the farm debt crisis increases a view that the Farm Bureau is an organization of big, wealthy farmers.”
The farm crisis caused a cascade of farm closures, leading to more land consolidation. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 1973, there were 2,844,000 farms in the U.S., averaging 383 acres. Today, there are 1,890,000 farms, averaging 464 acres.
Today, the Farm Bureau has become one of the most powerful lobby groups in Washington. In 2001, Fortune Magazine declared them one of the “Power 25,” a list of Washington’s most influential political interest groups, along with the National Rifle Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Realtors. The Bureau president is widely considered to be the second most powerful person in American agriculture, after the U.S. Agriculture Secretary.
While the policy priorities of the Bureau ostensibly bubble up from their rank-and-file members through a grassroots process, there are concerns that many members have that never seem to end up addressed in the annual policy book. Several current and former members have come out publicly about how concerns over the consolidation of equipment, input, and commodity firms and the use of industrial production methods never seem to rise through the ranks to the national team. A roadblock to pursuing these issues in Washington may lie in the organization’s insurance business.
Starting in the 1920s, the Bureau began to offer a range of insurance types to members. Many policyholders have been enrolled as members, even if they have never stepped foot on a farm. Insurance affiliates generate massive revenues for state Bureaus and their leadership, with 80% of the Iowa Farm Bureau, 56% of the Missouri Farm Bureau, and 38% of Illinois Farm Bureau revenues coming from insurance-related investments.
They are a farm organization for those who got big, not those who were forced out.
Curiously, Bureau lobbying power has been used to advance causes related to insurance rather than agriculture. In 2010, the Bureau lobbied against a public option health insurance plan, which would have allowed Medicare to compete with private insurance companies for enrollees under 65. Such a policy would have allowed consumers to attain savings on premiums and drug costs. More recently, state Bureau chapters have been lobbying for states to exempt their health insurance plans from federal consumer protections and coverage requirements. It’s difficult to see how small farmers, who can struggle to find workable insurance options, benefit from these activities.
Prior to the Second World War, the Bureau built membership and political capital by promoting policies that fought corporate greed, built a social safety net for poor farmers, and created avenues for economic democracy in rural America. Over time, however, they began to pursue a policy agenda favored by big business interests and defined by overproduction and consolidation, resulting in the dismantling of this system of rural empowerment.
In an interview, former Bureau president Bob Stallman (2001-2016) said, “Our goal as an organization as opposed to maybe other organizations has been to have a productive agricultural industry. Not to talk about a certain farm size as being the correct farm size. Not to talk about a certain income level for a farmer being the appropriate income level. We support agriculture as an industry.” This is a statement parroting neutrality but demonstrates who they fail to fight for. They are a farm organization for those who got big, not those who were forced out. Every small town with shuttered main streets, and every family forced off the land by the bank, should consider the role America’s largest farm organization played.
