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Farm Bureau advances poultry, foreign ag land and ag labor policy at convention

A South Dakota farmer and national vice president of the American Farm Bureau Federation says the organization took a stronger stance on several key issues at the annual convention this week.

Scott VanderWal tells Brownfield Farm Bureau members want to see changes to the contract poultry pay system.

“It’s the way the current contracts are ran by the poultry companies,” he says. “If there’s a little hiccup in feed intake or something, it can drastically impact the way a producer is paid. It tends to be things that are out of a producer’s control and can be a bad financial risk.”

VanderWal says Farm Bureau members support additional funding for the U.S. government to capture more data on foreign ag land transactions.

“If they can do a better job of data collection then we’ll have a better idea of what needs to be done,” he says. “We’ve had policy in the past that the U.S. Ag Secretary should be on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and we’ll continue to advocate for that.”

He says there were also new policies adopted on ag labor and artificial intelligence. The grassroots policies set the priorities of the organization for the year ahead.