The Yankee group visited people in eight Congressional offices:
- Sen. Patrick Leahy and Adrienne Wojciechowski
- Rep. Peter Welch and Patrick Satalin
- Rep. Ann McLane Kuster and Meghan Gaffney Buck
- Rep. Bill Owens and Nell Maceda
- Kathryn Tanner in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's Office
- Emily Lynch in Sen. Kelly Ayotte’s Office
- Erica Anhalt in Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s Office
- Caryn Compton in Sen. Bernard Sander's Office
 |
| Left to Right: Rob Guay-Staff Appraiser, Walt Gladstone-Board Member, Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, Rocky Giroux-Board Chairperson, Steve Taylor-Board Member |
Our main message was to remind our representatives that Yankee Farm Credit continues to meet the needs of our members by providing constructive credit and related services. In addition to healthy loan growth in 2013, Yankee Farm Credit paid $4.9 million in patronage refunds to member-customers by maintaining excellent financial results. The Congressional Offices were keenly interested in Yankee Farm Credit’s involvement and success with programs serving beginning, young and small farmers, including the FarmStart program. We urged our representatives to continue to support a strong cooperative Farm Credit System and the message was well received.
The Senate passed an immigration reform bill last year but the House had not yet addressed this issue. We expressed our support for immigration reform, stressing the need to address agricultural labor issues so that our members can be assured a reliable work force. Representatives were encouraged to support either comprehensive immigration reform or at least legislation which addresses the needs of our nation's farmers for year-round guest workers.
The Farm Bill passed earlier this year places a great deal of importance on the Federal Crop Insurance Program to protect farmers' production investments, rather than direct subsidy payments. This has placed the risk management decision making directly in the hands of farm owners. We expressed our support for this strategy but stressed the need for the implementation process to consider the unique attributes of Northeast agriculture to ensure that the Northeast maintains a strong agricultural industry.
Other issues addressed included the need to monitor the Food Safety Modernization Act rulemaking and implementation process, administered by the FDA. We urged our representatives to get involved if the FDA proposes regulations which are inflexible and do not allow sufficient time for farms to comply as this could have significant negative impact on our members' farms. We also asked our representatives to monitor the EPA's actions related to the expansion of their jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act to ensure that members' farms are not negatively impacted by overly onerous EPA regulation. Each office was provided with an informational packet which included a Business Profile, a Public Policy Statement and information about our most recent FarmStart investment.
While in DC the group also visited with Jeff Shipp, Jennie Materio and Robbie Boone of the Farm Credit Council and Todd Van Hoose of CoBank.
