The Iowa Farm Bureau Federation recently held its 85th annual meeting in Des Moines, where it re-elected Craig Lang to a second term as the federation’s president. The statewide organization represents about 155,000 members, about half of whom are farmers or agriculture-related business people. The Des Moines Business Record recently spoke with Lang, a dairy farmer from Brooklyn and a state legislator, about the directions that the organization is taking.

Q: What issues is the Iowa Farm Bureau working on?

A: Too often we’re seen as an insurance company. We’re actually not an insurance company; we own an insurance company. We are an organization of farmers that are trying to bring prosperity back to Iowa and improve the net farm income. Over the past two years we’ve focused on three things: education quality; bringing health benefits to our members or anyone in Iowa; and bringing economic opportunity across the whole state. … We want to make sure that everyone who wants to farm in Iowa has at least an opportunity to do it.

Q: What are some of the programs the Farm Bureau has instituted to improve the quality of life in Iowa?

A: We were the first ones that put money up for a wetlands mitigation bank in Central Iowa. Over the past two years, we have given scholarships to more than 94 FFA chapters in the state, totaling $175,000, to work on point-source environmental issues. Also, the federation has an annual challenge grant program that is distributed through county boards. Since the program began in 1997, more than 400 grants totaling $325,000 have been awarded. The funds have been used to plant trees, provide agricultural education information for schools, build sidewalks, plant flowers. There’s just a number of things we do that the state has no idea of. We try to publicize that, because we want it to be available.

Q: How does the Farm Bureau Federation set its policies?

A: At the state level, we have a house of delegates that’s composed of one farmer per county farm bureau; there are actually 100 county farm bureaus in Iowa (Pottawattamie County has two bureaus). Policy development begins at the county level and then proceeds to the state and national level.

Q: Does the lure of inexpensive insurance and other benefits the Farm Bureau provides its members tend to inflate its membership?

A: That’s fine; it gives us the opportunity to educate people on issues that our voting delegates think are important to know about. I would love to see 200,000 farm-supporting members added to our organization, because it gives us the ability to show them what farmers are actually doing, and it gives them the ability to sit in on a monthly county meeting and say, “Hey, girls and boys, these are the issues we’re looking at.”