Farm Bureau Vs. Wolves Rodger Schlickeisen Spring 1998

Home DEFENDERS Rodger Schlickeisen is President of Defenders of Wildlife.

"t's an early Christmas present!" That was the reaction of one of the supporters of the American Farm Bureau Federation when a federal judge in mid-December ruled that the three-year-old wolf reintroduction program in Yellowstone and central Idaho was illegal and that, as requested by the Farm Bureau, the wolves would have to be "removed." Removed in this case is a euphemism for killed, because there is nowhere else to put what will shortly be more than 200 wild wolves. In pressing its case, the Farm Bureau blissfully ignored the fact that the reintroduction has been the most successful ever under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). Never mind that the wolves have thrived, that the ecosystem is healthier with its top predator returned, that the local economy is benefiting by millions of dollars of additional tourism spending and that the public overwhelmingly supports the reintroduction. Never mind that if these wolves are removed and killed, the ESA still requires that wolf recovery at Yellowstone must be completed. And never mind that the Farm Bureau's alleged chief concern with the reintroduction -- economic loss to a handful of ranchers from wolf predation on livestock -- is a non-issue because Defenders of Wildlife pays ranchers at full market value for any such loss. Never mind all those things. As Farm Bureau attorney Rick Krause declared when debating me on a national TV news show, "We want the government to go back to square one." In other words, the bureau wants the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to start all over with a new recovery program that could not possibly be cheaper or work better than the one we have. I have to believe that the Farm Bureau is dissembling here, that what it really wants is "no wolves no way," as an old anti-wolf slogan puts it. But then, this is what we have come to expect from watching the Farm Bureau become more and more extremist in its fight against the nation's environmental laws and protections. The Farm Bureau must not get its way on wolf reintroduction. Defenders of Wildlife and its allies are appealing the judge's harsh and incorrect ruling. One has to have faith that straightforward common sense marshalled in defense of conservation values embraced by the vast majority of Americans will carry the day. But that is not certain, not when our chief opponent is an entity that Fortune magazine identified last December as one of the most powerful pressure groups in Washington, D.C. What is this mysterious anti-environmental behemoth cloaked in the guise of farming interests? It first came on the American scene in 1920, a complex of county farm organizations that combined into a single group with the help of big businesses. The group then opposed the growing populist farm movement that at the turn of the century sought to improve the social and economic lot of farmers and farm labor. Big business, particularly big agribusiness, wanted to quash this movement because populist success meant higher wages for farm labor and higher prices for farm produce. The farmers who helped found the organization were generally the owners of larger and more successful farms. In my opinion, the Farm Bureau was not the small farmer's friend then, nor is it the small farmer's friend today. During the 1930s and 1940s, the bureau fought various New Deal measures to educate and train farmers and to help them economically. One who worked for the Farm Bureau at the start was the late Representative Usher Burdick (R-North Dakota), who reflected on his experience in 1953, saying, ". . . I know all about them. I was there when they were first organized. They were organized by the banks, the insurance companies, the railroads and the chambers of commerce to keep the farmers quiet. I ought to know, because I was the first president of the Farm Bureau Federation in North Dakota and remained so until I found out what it was. . . ." Today, the Farm Bureau itself has become big business. Even as early as 1971, the Farm Bureau had become so formidable that Samuel Berger, now the President's national security adviser, in his book Dollar Harvest: The Story of the Farm Bureau, labeled the group "an agribusiness giant," "one of the largest business empires in the United States." Nevertheless, the Farm Bureau brags that it is a "true grass-roots organization" representing farmers' interests. This claim is dubious not only because of the organization's size, wealth and overt business interests but also because the lion's share of its members are not farmers and have next to nothing to do with deciding the bureau's position on public policy issues. The most significant common bond among its millions of "members" appears to be nothing more than a desire to purchase an insurance policy or some other item from a business venture that happens to be affiliated with the Farm Bureau. As Berger put it, "Membership has become little more than a device through which Farm Bureau products and services are sold," and the organization itself "has become more and more autocratic over the years." From the perspective of the environmental community, the Farm Bureau is a Goliath making war on environmentalism. The terminology used by Dean Kleckner, president of both the American Farm Bureau Federation and the American Agricultural Insurance Company, which provides reinsurance to the bureau's affiliated state insurance companies, shows where the group's leadership stands. In Kleckner's vocabulary, citizens who support issues such as wolf protection and clean water are "citizen vigilantes" and "envirocrats" who want to give "title to our lands" to "toads, owls, chubs, suckers, rats and bugs and weeds." "Take endangered species, please!" he says, in his best Rodney Dangerfield impersonation. His mission is less to preserve rural values than to destroy environmental ones. The Farm Bureau leadership, I believe, stands firmly in the camp of extremists who seek to undermine programs such as those fostered by the ESA. The executive vice president of the Montana Farm Bureau has claimed, "The whole wolf program is a fraud. The real goal was to use the Endangered Species Act to expand federal land-use control." The bureau's war against the wolf only hints at the far-reaching intent of the group's anti-environmental agenda. For example, in recent years the Farm Bureau opposed: No net loss of wetlands Legislation that would regulate the sale and use of nitrogen fertilizers, a chief pollutant of lakes, streams and estuaries Expanding Clean Water Act protections to include biological diversity The expansion of wilderness areas, but sought the protection of logging in national forests Adding more rivers to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System Currently the bureau is a key player in congressional efforts to gut the ESA, and it recently launched a new group to oppose U.S. ratification of the just-negotiated international treaty to combat global climate change. Bureau officials dismiss claims of climate warming as junk science and urge that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should be voluntary. The lawsuit involving Yellowstone wolves is not the first in which Defenders has tangled with the Farm Bureau. In 1989, Defenders sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stop the use of strychnine baits above ground against animals such as prairie dogs, ground squirrels and meadow mice. Defenders argued that these pesticides killed some 60 nontarget, federally protected species, including 15 threatened or endangered species. The Farm Bureau intervened on the side of EPA to continue use of the poisons, but lost the suit. The ruling affirmed that the ESA is absolute in its requirement that federal agencies protect endangered species. The Farm Bureau claims that it is pushing its vehement antiwolf agenda with the full support of its membership. If that is so, the bureau must possess one of the most statistically improbable memberships imaginable. We know from polls that 84 percent of Americans oppose removing and killing the Yellowstone wolves, while only 12 percent favor wolf removal. Has the Farm Bureau magically built its entire membership from the 12 percent who so hate saving endangered species that they would destroy this magnificent wildlife conservation program and the wolves themselves? Of course not. The Farm Bureau should substantiate its claims that its extremist anti-environmental agenda represents the wishes of its membership. I would be shocked if more than a tiny percentage of its customers even know that "their" Farm Bureau is engaged in widespread anti-environment battles, let alone which battles they are. Are they told at the time they become "members," by purchasing an insurance policy, that some of the revenue their membership dues and premiums are generating will be used to finance the various ideological battles chosen by the organization's carefully selected leadership? If there were a hard-core anti-environment group of members, it probably would be represented by those who attend the bureau's annual convention. But when I challenged Kleckner to poll conventiongoers on the bureau's wolf position, he refused, even though the convention was going on at the time. There is something frightening about the Farm Bureau's apparent ability to use what is in essence a conglomerate of commercial business ventures and a self-described "grassroots membership" to promote an extremist policy and a political agenda that the bureau has not substantiated as endorsed and that perhaps is even opposed by the bulk of its membership. This is the Goliath against which conservation Davids must fight in the effort to keep wolves alive in Yellowstone National Park.