NFU Blog

The National Farmers Union Foundation is awarding $500 scholarships to six recipients of the 2008 Stanley Moore Scholarship.

For six weeks the 2008 scholarship recipients will be the weekly member profile. This is the final profile of the series.

For 12 years, Jared Whitcomb and his parents Matthew and Connie have been involved in Farmers Union. Jared attended Farmers Union local and state camps, as a camper and later as a counselor.  In 2006, he attended NFU All-States Leadership Camp, where he was elected to the NYAC. This year he attended the College Conference on Cooperatives, co-hosted by NFU.

During last year’s Kansas Farmers Union Convention, Whitcomb was elected as a delegate to the NFU Convention and was appointed by NFU President Tom Buis to serve on the Credentials and Elections Committee.

Whitcomb attends Kansas State University, where he is majoring in animal sciences and industry in the area of production management. He transferred to KSU from Hutchinson Community College, where he played varsity football and achieved Academic All-American.

From NFU Summer Intern Mike Stranz

If you’ve watched TV in the past two weeks, you’ve probably seen the commercials from T. Boone Pickens and his plan to address  America’s energy crisis. Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman, stopped by our office on Capitol Hill yesterday and sat down with NFU President Tom Buis and the government relations staff to pitch his plan.

Much to Pickens’s dismay, the U.S. imports $700 billion worth of oil each year – most of which comes from the Middle East and Africa. He believes that petroleum is at or beyond its maximum production level and that someone needs to steer American fuel choices in a new direction. He suggests that natural gas be used much more intensively in the near future as a transportation fuel and to pin long-term hopes onto wind and solar energy to backfill the needs for electricity production. (more…)

This afternoon, NFU President Tom Buis attended “The Rural Development Title of the Farm Bill: Why it is Vital to Rural America,” a briefing sponsored by the National Grange Foundation. Presenters at the event addressed specific rural development issues including access to high speed internet, renewable energy development and library facilities in rural areas.

Title VI of the farm bill addresses rural development, and this briefing aimed to highlight the importance of funding programs in rural America. Access to high speed internet is vital for rural economic development; studies have shown that state-of-the-art communications, coupled with transportation, education and library services, is absolutely essential in stimulating economic development in rural America.

Buis also highlighted the importance of providing incentives and opportunities for growth in the renewable energy sector in rural America. Locally-owned projects generate 2.6 times more jobs and 3.1 times more rural economic benefit than those with outside ownership.

“Rural areas will see much more economic activity from locally-owned projects than they will from corporate-owned projects,” Buis said. “Local investors will re-invest in the community where the project is based. Big companies will filter out their profits to other areas.”

By Tom Buis, National Farmers Union President

The following letter was to the editor of TIME magazine in response to the magazine’s April 7 cover story, The Clean Energy Scam.

The Clean Energy Scam must be what Dwight Eisenhower was talking about when he said, “farming is mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the nearest corn field.”

It’s easy for those far away from the heartland to point fingers; yet rural Americans are the ones finding the solutions we need to decrease our dependence on oil.

Land conversion in developing countries, as explained in the article, has been occurring for decades. In fact, the Science article quoted by author Michael Grunwald uses land conversion data from the 1990s, long before the expansion of the ethanol industry and when commodity prices were at record lows.

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By Tom Buis, National Farmers Union President

It’s only natural that consumers want to know why prices are increasing at their neighborhood grocery. The big oil lobby and a host of special interest groups have begun promulgating the myth that increased ethanol production, and its demand for corn crops, is responsible for increased food costs. It’s a gross oversimplification and in fact, its plain wrong.

According the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), non-farm costs including marketing, processing, wholesaling, distribution and retailing account for 80 cents of every food dollar spent in the United States. For example, an 18-ounce box of Corn Flakes is priced at $3.70 in Washington, D.C. grocery stores. The farmer’s share of that total? Five cents. There is a lot more at play than corn prices. Furthermore, Americans spend less on food than anywhere else in the world. Of every dollar Americans spend, just 9.9 cents is spent on food.

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This year, ethanol produced in rural America will supply about 6 billion gallons of fuel to the United States, allowing farmers to receive a price from the marketplace rather than from the government, while providing clean-burning fuel that is good for the environment and decreasing our dependence on non-renewable fuel sources. No doubt, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), adopted by Congress in 2005, has proven to be extremely successful.

A Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) would build upon the success of the RFS. A major increase in harnessing renewable electricity would benefit American farmers. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia currently have a state-level RES in place, which has laid the groundwork for how a national RES could be implemented.

A recent National Farmers Union report highlights farmers’ roles in providing clean, renewable energy to Americans, and a 2006 study done by the University of Tennessee found that supplying 25 percent of U.S. electricity and vehicle fuels from America’s farm lands will directly add $114 billion in annual revenues and 1.2 million jobs to the agricultural sector by 2025.

Several studies have also shown that along with the revenue that will be brought to farmers through the use of their land, revenues for rural communities can be increased through local ownership. A farmer could receive five times the annual projected income by owning the wind turbines as opposed to entering into a land lease agreement with outside ownership.

Read more about NFU’s energy policy.