Iowa Farm Bureau is a suburban insurance company pretending to be the voice of farmers
I recently ran for Congress in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, and one of the biggest lessons I learned during my campaign is that the Iowa Farm Bureau sets the conversation on agricultural policy. No other organization has so much power over agricultural policy at the state or federal level.
Although the Iowa Farm Bureau was created to advocate for Iowa’s farmers and rural communities, it now receives 84% of its revenue from its for-profit insurance arm, the FBL Financial Group, which controlled $10.1 billion in assets in 2017 alone. Its holdings include millions of dollars of investments in large agribusiness conglomerates like Monsanto and Tyson. As a result, the Iowa Farm Bureau has an operating budget of $89 million, more than twice that of its national counterpart: the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Those revenue sources have given the Iowa Farm Bureau significant power both in Iowa and in the national agricultural space. In the 1970s, the Iowa Farm Bureau’s lobbying efforts, in conjunction with Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, led to significant changes to the New Deal agricultural policies that sought to manage supply and protect farmers from the big agribusiness companies. The Iowa Farm Bureau successfully fought to replace this system with one that forced farmers to get big or get out, and pushed them to plant crops fencerow to fencerow. Its mantra was simple: volume, volume and more volume. It continues to push for cultivation of only a few crops without any consideration of the consequences of this model.
Monopolies thrive under this system. Two companies — Monsanto-Bayer and Dow-DuPont — will soon control about three-quarters of the U.S. corn seed market, and the meat industry is now even more concentrated than when Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” more than a century ago. The Iowa Farm Bureau stands to financially benefit from this increased market concentration, which may explain why it has not opposed any of these mergers.