The farm’s Big Business Bureau
The Farm Bureau, non-profit organization tax, which is called the “voice of agriculture,” is a rural settlement, announced to the family of farmers in the USA, but many farmers learn in 60 minutes on Sunday to come, that in recent years, while Tens of thousands of farmers are sinking into debt, the club they are with their amount of the annual fee was designed to create a Business-profit empire worth several billion. And it has invested millions of dollars in some of the same giant agro-enterprises of the Farm Bureau members say they are the driving force behind the operation .
The report by Mike Wallace to be broadcast Sunday 9 April in 60 minutes.
The Farm Bureau has many interests for profits outside traditional agriculture. His only Iowa chapter owns and manages $ 3.5 billion insurance and financial services companies, is that trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, FBL Financial Group, gave thousands of stock options to its directors, including the presidents of the 14 offices of the state farm.
Wallace questioned resumption Ed Stone, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau and chairman of the FBL Financial, on a few hundred thousand bucks stock options at the moment, as in the sector during 1998, a year of serious economic hardship for farmers of Iowa. “Yeah, that’s right, and that undoubtedly helped me,” says resumption stone. “I have four children to school, and this is a part of them. I think this is just the nature, as it is. ”
The Farm Bureau, said its investments it possible that, to fund education programs and peasants, what she needs, such as insurance.
But some family farmers say that the Farm Bureau’s investments they have in the pockets of Corporate America. “All [ ’s Farm Bureau] decisions are made for professionals in America, because themselves a part of it,” Iowa farmer Linus Solberg said Wallace.
The farmers of the Farm Bureau’s efforts to defeat, that national legislation would have imposed 18-month moratorium on agro-mergers. The various companies that Iowa’s Farm Bureau FBL Financial Group is investing the amount in millions of ConAgra, a giant diversified life has mostly to mergers. Another Farm Bureau in Mississippi has more than 18000 shares Premium Standard Farms, a huge pork processor family, as farmers say, is pressing the operation.
Not all the Farm Bureau’s investments are related to agriculture, but. The Iowa Farm Bureau and two of its affiliates has decreased by at least $ 1 million in AccessAir, a start-up air in Des Moines, there is little bankrupt. “You are a farmer with money to invest, while outside agriculture, farmers are in combat,” says Gary beer Schenk, Iowa, a farmer who has failed to preside over the Iowa Farm Bureau . “The breath than me.”
Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, which habattled of the Farm Bureau of the environment, “says Wallace, Farm Bureau that activities must be adjacent to many Americans, farmers. Fortune Magazine usual ranks of the Farm Bureau’s most powerful lobbyists in Washington.
And Cook recalls, his agenda goes far beyond agriculture. “If you are concerned about the rights of citizens against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. You want to remove the cornerstone of civil law,” said Cook. “If you think the minimum wage is low, they are against the ‘increase. If you think we should not be boring Off-shore oil, they want to drill off-shore oil. ”
Farm Bureau Even some leaders are surprised to learn, the Association of non-agricultural agenda. During the confrontation with his own organization in its application for annulment of the Voting Rights Act, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau reconstruction stone Wallace said he was “shocked”.
What makes the Farm Bureau Beltway such a station (George W. Bush to its recipients in the last annual congress of January) is the size of its membership nearly five million. The made him the nation’s largest farm organization.
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