Anyone wishing to take on state change must understand Farm Bureau’s make-up. Most members think of Farm Bureau as a farmer’s advocacy organization that also happens to provide insurance. The farmers for whom Farm Bureau provides advocacy is becoming clear. When you recognize that agribusiness organizations are at the forefront of NAIS, the idea that insurance is secondary crumbles quickly.

Farm Bureau is a large purveyor of insurance. On its website Farm Bureau lists two affiliates: The American Farm Bureau Foundation (which provides educational services) and American Farm Bureau Insurance Services. Looking at this structure with regard to NAIS is more revealing. Farm Bureau has been in the insurance business a long time. Nationwide Insurance Company was formed in 1925 by the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation to provide automobile insurance for Farm Bureau members. According to the environmental activist group Prairie Rivers, as far back as 1999 the Illinois Farm Bureau had significant ownership interest in 21 companies, seven of them being insurance companies. This isn’t that odd, as Farm Bureau had 57 insurance affiliates, with 65 “other” business affiliates, across the country. In addition to insurance companies, Prairie Rivers’ report listed Illinois Farm Bureau’s holdings in fertilizer companies and other providers of farm services and goods.

The percentage of Farm Bureau members who are actually farmers may come as a shock. When Prairie Rivers did its research in 1999, Farm Bureau had more than 4.9 million members nationwide, but for the year directly previous, the USDA counted 1.9 million farmers (not all of whom belonged to Farm Bureau). Based on USDA’s 2002 Census of Agriculture (the latest available figures), those numbers are now 5.5 million members and 2.1 million farmers nationwide. On the state level, for example, according to the Illinois Agriculture Statistics Annual Summary, in 1999 Illinois Farm Bureau had 345,000 members, but the state had only 79,000 farm operations.

Even earlier, in 1971 Samuel Berger (later, chief of the National Security Council) wrote in his book {Dollar Harvest,} “Whether the non-farmer percentage [of membership in Farm Bureau] is 20%, 30%, or 50%, it is significant enough to deserve full disclosure to government bodies, and to warrant mention in general descriptions of the organization. When such an organization becomes a powerful influence on national farm policy, the public has a right to know such information.” Samuel Berger left out one group of people with a need to know: Farm Bureau members. Shouldn’t farmer members be informed they’re now in a minority in Farm Bureau?

Farmers are going out of business rapidly—some people estimate at the rate of eight per hour. So we can expect the difference between the number of Farm Bureau members and the number of farmers will continue to widen. What effect does this have on Farm Bureau policy, when farmers are in the minority as members, and the primary business of Farm Bureau is insurance plus, at least in the case of the Illinois Farm Bureau, commercial concerns that sell services and products to farmers? The result is NAIS and similar policies.

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Karin Bergener is an attorney living in Freedom, Ohio, a former member of the board of directors of the Portage County, Ohio, Farm Bureau, and co-founder of Liberty Ark Coalition. This article appeared in the Holiday 2006 issue of Rural Heritage.