5 Questions With The New American Farm Bureau President
February 13, 2016 In January, delegates of the American Farm Bureau Federation elected a new president to replace the retiring Bob Stallman, who had served for 16 years in leadership. The president of the Georgia Farm Bureau, Vincent “Zippy” Duvall, was elected to take the reins of the farm advocacy organization.
Duvall is a third generation dairy and poultry farmer from Georgia and has been involved with the Farm Bureau most of his working life. He had served as president of the Georgia Bureau since 2006. Duvall traveled to 29 states to meet with Farm Bureau boards to campaign for the job. After racking up 55,000 miles, he secured the victory during the Bureau’s annual meeting in Orlando.
I reached out to Duvall to talk about his preparation for the new job and his priorities as he heads to Washington, D.C., to become a major new voice for American agriculture.
1. How did your previous experiences with the Farm Bureau prepare you for this national leadership position?
Duvall: At a young age, I got involved with the Farm Bureau’s young farmer and leadership development program. I have served on just about every seat offered to me over the years. You look at those programs, and I am a perfect example of how they can shape your life. When you put a group of young people together who farm, their lives revolve around their track of land or those animals they are tending to. Then you put them on an airplane to Washington, D.C., and let them experience the process of what our elected officials go through to make policy every day, it makes huge impression on them.
What we try to make growers understand is that your voice can make a difference. But to do that, you have to be involved and active and educate yourself on the issues. And, you have to be bold enough to pick up the phone or type out an email or however you choose to communicate and let your thoughts and wishes be known to elected representatives.
It normally makes a huge impression on young people, and it did on me as I was coming up. It is easy to sit on the farm and say to yourself my voice doesn’t count. Well, it doesn’t count if you don’t use it. That is what the Farm Bureau taught me and that is what we are trying to teach young people across this country.
2. What were some the issues you heard other growers talk about as you traveled the country to campaign for president?
Duvall: The first thing we heard about is regulation and how we are slowly but surely losing our private property rights through the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act. We all know those three pieces of legislation were good pieces of legislation when they were created. But, as we moved along, we’ve added on to them and redefined them. All three have become very cumbersome and costly to the landowners across the country.
In that way, we are going to continue to monitor what happens with these acts. We are hoping the Supreme Court will hear the Chesapeake Bay challenge, because it will be one of those areas that by example could impact other watersheds across the country. We have to be involved because what happens there could happen in our own back yard.
We are going to continue to fight the Waters Of The U.S. (WOTUS) and will continue to encourage Congress to find other ways to stop it. We were extremely disappointed in the veto by the President on the last action Congress took on WOTUS.
We are an organization created to help farmers in the public policy area, but the other thing I heard is the growing importance of public opinion — what we do as farmers and how we do it. We are going to be watching food security and food safety issues with the Food Safety Modernization Act. We believe Americans should know where their food comes from and how safe it is. We want to be sure we open up a dialogue with them and have conversations between our farmers and consumers. Most of the time, if people have an open mind and we have an opportunity to share with them what we do and why we do it, we build common ground. We need to communicate to them that we live off the land, so we are not going to destroy environment or our water because our families live there and consume the water and the food grown there.
New American Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall (right) with new vice president Scott VanderWal (left).
3. What are some other priority areas you will be focused on?
Duvall: Immigration is a huge issue. We are almost at a crisis when it comes to farm labor across this country. Immigration reform is something we are very interested in. We understand the landscape we are in right now with the presidential election will not allow serious conversations, but we will continue to monitor this and if the campaign allows us to have that conversation, we will take it.
We are very interested in trade. We have the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and we need to get it approved. Specialty crops, beef, and a lot of other crops will have a big boost through this trade treaty. We need farmers to get on the phone and tell their elected representatives how important it is we approve the TPP in order to move forward and open those markets.
4. How important will specialty crops be during your tenure?
Duvall: I come from Georgia and we grow just about everything from apples to zucchini there. We mirror American agriculture between our regional differences and the commodities we grow. I come from a state where we don’t show any partiality to any particular kind of farm or what they are growing. My job is to get up every day and fight for farmers. It doesn’t make any difference whether they are growing oranges or almonds or milking cows or taking care of chickens. If there is an opportunity to help a farmer, we are going to put the same effort in all types of farms across America.
5. What opportunities are you most excited about?
Duvall: We should be very excited about the technologies coming down the pike. It is so exciting we are going to have the opportunity to become even more efficient and more productive. We carry the awesome responsibility as American farmers to feed our country and the rest of the world. No one else is better equipped to do that than we are.
In addition, to have an audience (Americans) that is interested in their food and where it comes from and how it is grown, is a huge opportunity. Even though some people see this as a challenge, we can really have a conversation to let consumers understand what really happens on our farms and how careful we are doing it
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