When you lift the fork to your mouth, do you think about how food gets to your plate?
As a fraction of all American workers, farmers don’t rank very high. Farmers make up about two percent of officially recognized occupational classes. But they feed all of us, plus hundreds of millions around the world.
The Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation, with some 680,000 members, is the largest of its counterpart organizations in the country. Now in its 102nd year as the collective spokesperson and advocate for farmers and agricultural interests, the group is led by its ninth president, Eric Mayberry.
As guest speaker Thursday at The Rotary Club of McMinnville, Mayberry emphasized the core values of the voluntary membership organization, which represents local farm bureaus in all of Tennessee’s 95 counties. “Principled, trustworthy, responsible, grassroots,” he underscored as leading elements of the group’s commitments to members and society as a whole.
The Farm Bureau is a powerful voice in the US Congress and state legislatures. One of its conspicuous successes recently is the “right to repair” settlements with the top manufacturers of farm machinery. These memoranda of understanding (MoU’s) with companies like John Deere and Kubota allow farmers access to propriety software and replacement parts that allow them to service their own equipment.
Another salient issue, Mayberry stressed, is the continuing loss of farmland to development for other purposes — residential subdivisions, manufacturing sites, and highway construction, for example.
“We’re losing farmland at an alarming rate,” Mayberry told the Rotarians and their guests at the weekly luncheon meeting at First Presbyterian Church.
According to his data, 1.1 million acres of Tennessee farm fields went out of production and into other uses between 1997 and 2017. That calculates to 55.601 acres of loss per year, or 6.3 acres per hour.
The rate of loss is accelerating, he stated. Since 2017, losses in the state grew to 86,000 acres per year. Among the “hardest hit counties” are Rutherford, Sevier and Williamson.,” he noted.
Also in the Rotary meeting, the group honored the civic, humanitarian and community-building service of the late Warren County Farm Bureau leader and insurance agent Swanson Bennett, who passed away July 21 at age 92. During his 30 years in that position Bennett led the growth of the organization from 40 to 5,000 members and strengthened the position of farm families and their priorities in government policy making.
Another prime mover in family farm interests — the late James Robert (Bobby) Love — was honored posthumously at Noon Rotary. Rotary Club secretary Haile Adams is the fiancée of Love’s son, Wilson, who continues the tradition of family service in the community and Farm Bureau. Bobby Love was a 40-year member of the Warren County TFB affiliate and its president for 13 years.
Mayberry expands on his Rotary remarks when he appears this week on the FOCUS interview program from McMinnville Public Radio 91.3-WCPI. The half-hour interview airs Tuesday at 5 p.m. and again Thursday at 1 p.m.
