Illinois farmer Kenneth Hartman, Jr., is the new president of the National Corn Growers Association. He’s selected “Building Bridges” as the theme for his year in the president’s chair.
“Where that came from is we have a bridge that’s on the farm that was here before my grandfather bought this farm. My great, great grandfather, when he came from Germany in the 1860s, he was a stonemason. In 1870, there was an old road that went through here, and he built that bridge in 1870. So, ironically, I found out a few years ago that it was my great, great grandfather that built that bridge. But I mean, you look back, it’s a stone bridge, and that was a very complex and hard job to build that bridge. Well, right now, we want to build bridges. We want to work with our other commodity organizations. We need to work with other people who have interests similar to what we have.”
He says the biggest problem farmers currently face is no farm bill, and commodity groups descended on Capitol Hill to share that point.
“I know we were out there a few weeks ago. I think it was the first time in years that we had the commodity organizations all there together with the American Farm Bureau. We went and made visits. We had corn and soybeans, but we also had rice, peanuts, cotton, sorghum, Farm Bureau, and even Farm Credit, and some of the financial institutes were with us there, explaining how important this farm bill is. I mean, when you start looking at where the economy is right now with agriculture, we’ve got some of the lower prices we’ve had in many years. We’ve got inflation factors. I say that when you start looking at fuel, you look at fertilizer, you look at labor costs, you look at equipment costs, interest is high compared to what it was a few years ago. We need a farm bill that’s current. Last year, they kicked the can down the road with an extension. We definitely don’t need that now. We need a Farm Bill.”
The NCGA president says his group has a lot of priority issues to get to work on.
“Some of the National Corn Growers’ priorities is we start looking at risk management and crop insurance. We need people to take higher levels of crop insurance with the risk that’s out there today, so we need support for that. We need markets. We need MAP and FMD funding, and one of the National Corn Growers’ major policies is creating new markets and helping our markets that we have currently. So, we need to work on creating markets there when it comes to ethanol when it comes to carbon overseas, this is all very important.”
Ken Hartmann, the new president of the National Corn Growers Association.