by Vicki Monks
Spring 1999
|
Meeting the Farm
Bureau by Vicki Monks Spring 1999 |
|
|  |
For weeks, Farm Bureau staff had been warning delegates, speakers and
the press to expect some ugliness from demonstrators angered by AFBF's
efforts to thwart wolf reintroductions in Yellowstone National Park, Idaho
and the Southwest. "Frankly, we're expecting things could turn violent,"
Erik Ness, communications director of the New Mexico Farm and Livestock
Bureau, an AFBF affiliate, told this reporter a few days before the
convention opened. "We hope not, but we've had a lot of bomb threats." He
declined to elaborate except to accuse Defenders of Wildlife of inciting
the alleged threats.
At the convention, Defenders of Wildlife did make its presence felt,
but hardly the way Ness suggested. Defenders invited Farm Bureau delegates
to a country dance with barbecue supplied by a New Mexico rancher, Jim
Winder. Several hundred Farm Bureau members feasted on "Wolf Country Beef"
being marketed by Winder under an agreement with Defenders in which he
pledged to forgo traditional predator control on his two ranches.
Defenders also conducted a joint news conference with the National
Family Farm Coalition, representing some 100,000 farming families in 35
states. The coalition s president, Bill Christisen, told reporters: "We're
concerned that the Farm Bureau continues to antagonize environmental
groups, rather than focus on the causes of low farm prices." He called the
real problem "the corporate takeover of agriculture," which he blamed for
slashing farm prices and "destroying our way of life."
Defenders' interest in the week-long convention stemmed from a Farm
Bureau lawsuit resulting in a 1997 federal court order for removal of
reintroduced wolves from Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho.
Defenders and others, including the federal government, have appealed the
order, saying it would destroy the wolves because there is no place for
them to go.
The 4.8-million-member Farm Bureau has denied wanting to see the wolves
killed, and Defenders had been hoping the bureau would drop its opposition
to wolf reintroductions. But the convention made no move in this
direction. Instead, delegates approved a resolution calling for return of
the Yellowstone and Idaho wolves to Canada even though Secretary of the
Interior Bruce Babbitt last year told a congressional committee that
Canada will not take the wolves back.
As an alternative, Farm Bureau leaders claim the Yellowstone and Idaho
wolves could be moved to zoos or wild-animal parks. But Sydney Butler,
executive director of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, after
checking with member institutions said last fall that zoos could
accommodate at most only a few of the wolves.
More than 4,000 Farm Bureau members attended the convention, but only
383 elected as delegates from state farm bureaus were permitted to vote.
Despite claiming they don t want to see the Yellowstone and Idaho wolves
killed, the delegates approved another resolution calling for amending the
Endangered Species Act to allow landowners to kill protected species on
private property. Delegates maintained that no species should be protected
at all unless the government demonstrates that "the benefits to humans
exceed the costs to humans."
Another approved resolution objected to allowing wildlife to graze
"free of charge" on federal lands as "discriminatory to other grazing
users who pay for forage on an animal-unit-month basis." Still another
resolution proposed renaming prairie dogs "prairie rats" so people would
no longer think of them as "comparable to poodles."
The Farm Bureau brags that it is the largest farmer organization in the
country. Yet most of its members are actually insurance customers who join
to qualify for discounts on their home, auto, life and health coverage and
have no say in setting the huge organization s policies. Membership dues
paid by these insurance customers feed a war chest that the bureau uses to
lobby for a range of right-wing causes -- including what Defenders
President Rodger Schlickeisen has called an "extremist anti-environmental
agenda."
At the news conference, Schlickeisen accused the Farm Bureau of
exaggerating the wolf threat to livestock. "They picked the wolf as a
particular target for their rhetoric, and they have tried to inflame the
farming and ranching community well beyond any reasonable measure of the
problems that the wolf represents," he told reporters. Defenders maintains
a Wolf Compensation Trust that reimburses ranchers for verified livestock
losses to wolves. Since 1987 it has paid out $70,000 to northern Rockies
ranchers and about $350 in the Southwest. AFBF president Dean Kleckner
insists that wolves and other predators cause ranchers grave economic
harm. Losing even a few calves can make a huge difference in a rancher s
ability to survive, he says. Yet according to the Department of
Agriculture, in 1996 -- the latest year for which figures are available
all kinds of predators, including bears, coyotes, wolves and domestic
dogs, killed only about 117,000 head of cattle, a small number compared to
the 417,000 lost to bad weather and more than 2 million to respiratory and
digestive ailments. " I've never heard that before," Kleckner said in a
radio interview during the convention, "and frankly, I don't believe it."
(The statistics are posted on the Agriculture Department's Web page.)
The Farm Bureau lists fighting wolf reintroductions as one of its top
ten priorities, and the affiliated New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau
has challenged the recent Mexican wolf reintroduction in Arizona-New
Mexico border country in another lawsuit. However, the anti-wolf position
is not universally favored by Farm Bureau members, judging by comments
from some who attended the Defenders dance and barbecue.
To be sure, many ranchers attending the party expressed some skepticism
about coexistence with wolves. But North Dakota rancher Bill Gackle
declared: "The predators are just a minor problem compared to the prices
that we're currently receiving. The predators are in no way running the
farmers off the land, whereas the prices, the economy, are."
In a poll conducted last year for Defenders of Wildlife and released
during the convention, 88 percent of farmers surveyed believed the farm
economy is in trouble, and a sizable majority supported measures to break
up agricultural monopolies. Two thirds of these farmers identified
themselves as environmentalists. Only 28 percent called the Farm Bureau an
effective advocate for family farms.
During Defenders' news conference, Kent Weber, director of a traveling
educational program called Mission:Wolf, introduced reporters to Rami, a
six-year-old gray wolf that now lives in Weber's Colorado wolf refuge. "I
find ranchers all over the country who understand wildlife and appreciate
it," he said. "They come up to tell me about wolves they've had around
their ranches and what they're like. It's the politics that seems to hurt
these animals more than anything."
Throughout the convention, AFBF president Kleckner labeled wolf
supporters "protesters," and other Farm Bureau leaders accused Defenders
of associating with eco-terrorists, even after Defenders President
Schlickeisen denounced violence of any kind. "Anybody who would make a
bomb threat or any kind of physical threat is not in keeping with our way
of doing business," Schlickeisen told reporters. "We absolutely condemn
it."
Schlickeisen also said at the news conference that it is time to put
antagonism aside. "The Farm Bureau has tried to drive a wedge between the
environmental community and the family farming community, which really
should be natural allies. Family farmers help protect the land, and we
want to promote their continuation. I wish the Farm Bureau would focus its
attention on bridging the gap, because we'd be the first ones to get upon
that bridge and put out our hands to meet them halfway," he declared.
|
utside the Albuquerque, New Mexico,
convention center during the annual meeting of the American Farm Bureau
Federation (AFBF) last January, a group of Iowa delegates stood puzzling
over the absence of protesters. "After all the big deal they've been
making over this, I'm kind of disappointed," one delegate lamented.