How Farm Bureau Got Started

By Stewart Truelsen

Tucked away in the corner of a shopping plaza near Binghamton, N.Y., is a rock monument with a plaque on it. Few passersby pay any attention to it, but many people do pay attention to the organization whose founding it commemorates – Farm Bureau.

The rock rests on land that was once the farm of James Quinn, the first president of the Broome County Farm Bureau in 1911. Quinn's farm was near town and fell victim to urban growth, but agriculture is still important in the county, contributing tens of millions of dollars to the economy.

The president of the Broome County Farm Bureau is now Bill Olin, a dairy farmer. Olin has familiarized himself with the history of what started here and quickly became a national movement. Ironically, the big concern in 1911 was not much different than today – farms going out of business.

"We have two rivers running through the county, but the uplands are hardpan soils and not the most productive, and there were a lot of farms that were going out of production at that point," says Olin. The abandoned farms caught the attention of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad and the Binghamton Chamber of Commerce. They sought help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and New York State College of Agriculture. The result was a joint effort to hire a county agent to oversee the first Farm Bureau.

The name Farm Bureau became synonymous with American agriculture, but over the years the name has caused confusion too. Non-farmers often mistake it for an agency of the government. Olin recalls how Farm Bureau got the name. "The various divisions of the chamber of commerce are divided into bureaus like the visitors and convention bureau. Farm Bureau was an extension of that idea," he says.

From the beginning, Farm Bureau has been a problem solving organization. The problem in 1911 was finding better farming methods for the hilly farm ground in the county. Today, the problems are likely to be global, like the ones encountered by Dave Johnson, an apple grower. "China now sets the price of apples that I sell 10 miles away, so it is not a good situation. We are trying to get around it by having people come and pick apples off of our farm and we are selling less and less downtown," says Johnson.

Another Farm Bureau member, Steve Herz, raises Morgan horses, a versatile and stylish breed. Like many farm families today, he and his wife also hold off-farm jobs; they work as teachers. Herz likes the fact that Farm Bureau represents all of agriculture. "If we are helping agriculture in general, we are helping us in particular," he says.

President Olin reasons that if Farm Bureau hadn't started in Broome County, it would have formed somewhere else because farmers need it. "We know that we can get a lot more done working together in an organization than the same number of people, or more people, running around in all different directions," he says.

Stewart Truelsen is the director of broadcast services for the American Farm Bureau Federation.

Published October 15, 2001