By Carrie Muehling
SAN DIEGO – The annual meeting of the American Farm Bureau Federation wrapped up earlier this week in San Diego.
Illinois Farm Bureau delegates were successful in bringing some new policy ideas to the table at the national meeting. One deals with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and their use in agriculture.
“That’s becoming a very important tool. It already is an important tool for agriculture to utilize. What this new policy does is basically just clarifies some of the, I guess, regulatory issues that the FAA would try to regulate the use of the UAVs under, and then maybe, more importantly kind of protects some property rights for our landowners,” said Mark Gebhards, executive director for the governmental affairs division at the Illinois Farm Bureau.
Gebhards said farmers don’t want the unintended use of UAVs to infringe on private property rights and the ability to work with livestock or grain production. The Illinois delegation also brought forward a few amendments, which were included in the proposed policy.
Crop insurance also saw some discussion, specifically the situation of using crop insurance in a double crop soybean situation, which is a very predominant practice in southern Illinois.
“It will allow us the ability to work with RMA to distinguish between double crop soybeans so that they’re not treated as one claim, if you will, in soybean production for our producers,” said Gebhards.
Gebhards said the policy set would allow double crop soybeans to be a separate claim from traditionally grown soybeans. The group also looked at industrial hemp production, now including growth of that crop in policy regarding its specialty crop section.
“Allows us to again, kind of have the ability to work with production practices and advocate for industrial hemp production as another aspect of agriculture in Illinois. Again, there is a lot of diversity in our state and this is one more example of that. This puts in place some policy that we can use there,” said Gebhards.
Rita Frazer of the RFD Radio Network contributed to this story. She can be reached at [email protected].
Carrie Muehling can be reached at [email protected].
