Washington Farm Bureau Against NAIS
by Sara Kretz

Regarding the article by Karin Bergener Sold Out by Farm Bureau some of this is true, but the spin is deceiving and I’m angry about it. Trashing Farm Bureau (FB) is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and there are way too many dead babies on the ground already. There are many non farmer members in FB, but they do {not} vote on policy or anything else in FB.

Okanogan County [Washington] Farm Bureau is against mandatory NAIS, but instead of quitting FB and throwing rocks, what did we do? We wrote policy against mandatory NAIS, passed it at the county level, did our homework and got it passed at the state level. That means we have to take personal responsibility, sometimes at great personal cost, to educate people to get them to see it our way. Then we got it passed to send it on to AFBF. We get three delegates at the national meeting and they will represent us to the AFBF delegates on this policy.

Some cattleman support mandatory NAIS. Why? Many cattleman believe they are losing foreign markets because America doesn’t have a NAIS. I disagree and I personally will not give away my rights, but there are a lot of cattleman who are on the edge of losing everything and they need to do something. The desire to make a living is not evil as implied in the article. In looking for answers to our many problems, the easy solutions seem to involve taking or giving away individual rights. We really need to be creative and imaginative to find solutions that retain our individual freedom.

The proposed NAIS is bad, so why aren’t we doing something constructive to change AFBF’s position on this instead of trying to destroy them? We are a self governing nation. We have a responsibility to actively take part in governing ourselves. To the anti NAIS movement I say, keep up the good activism, but don’t try to destroy other good activists on the way. 

Farm Bureau is also a self governing organization from the bottom up. If the voting members don’t like what’s going on they need to take personal responsibility and get to work. As noted in the article, three guys affiliated with FB started all of this 15 or so years ago. Well, here’s me. All we need is two more to push it the other way. It is not FB’s responsibility to tell us members anything, it is our responsibility to tell FB. We write the policies and we fight the policies we don’t like. It takes a lot of time to educate and change minds and we may lose, but I will not quit. Washington Farm Bureau is the most powerful advocate of private property rights in the state. That is one big baby that I’m not willing to throw out on the ground with the bathwater to die.

Attorney Karin Bergener Responds

Sara Kretz lives in Wauconda, Washington. Her letter appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of Rural Heritage.