At the annual California State Grange convention last October, the delegates approved the leadership of the Grange to move forward on a No Budget – No Pay initiative that would cause legislators and the Governor to forfeit their pay and per diem beginning July 1 st if a budget is not passed. The Constitutional deadline for passing a budget is June 15th of each year. By taking on this challenge, the Grange is providing a great service for the people of California who overwhelmingly support the initiative. A recent survey conducted by SurveyUSA found that 67% of the California public supports such an initiative.

By promoting this initiative we are also promoting Grange as an organization capable of taking on significant issues of the day. The poll also found that over 70% of the public thought that such an action would be effective in getting a budget on time. Grange President Randall Lewis is appealing to Governor Schwarzenegger for support, and Public Relations Director Bob McFarland will be appealing directly to community Grangers to sponsor fundraisers in support of the No Budget – No Pay initiative.

Colorado State University is spearheading an effort to discuss, redefine, and consider the potential paths that Agriculture may take in Colorado in the future. The study examines critical and potentially limiting trends in Colorado’s food, fiber, and green production including labor, water and cash, and seeks to examine the role that rural communities will play in agriculture’s future. Grangers may visit the website to further research and comment on the study at: http://futureofcoloradoagriculture.blogspot.com/. Web visitors are invited to share their comments.

The Idaho Legislature has received the Governor’s recommendation on the stimulus package. This amount is between $1.1 and $1.3 billion dollars. The requests from agencies and other groups, including cities and schools, far exceeded the amounts of money Idaho received. The Joint Appropriations and Finance Committee has introduced a state budget. These bills will be debated, hopefully be adopted, and signed into law. Of course there will be disagreements during the process.

The Idaho General Assembly keeps introducing legislation. As of March 12, the Senate introduced 156 bills and the House of Representatives introduced 297 bills. The Governor has signed only 32 of these into law. The Idaho Ag Summit was recently convened in Boise to address alternative sources of energy and the need to provide more electricity by the year 2025.

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine announced Douglas Fisher as the new state Secretary of Agriculture at the State Agricultural Convention. The Governor also professed his support for the state Farmland Preservation Program and the State Preservation Fund, which receives money to preserve farmland in NJ. Legislators addressed Convention delegates and offered several funding proposals for the preservation of open space. Whether or not an agreement can be reached by the Legislators and the Governor before the November 2009 election remains to be seen. If the Legislature and the Governor can reach an acceptable agreement, the Grange and Grangers should support and promote the program. In this present economic climate, needed support for farmland preservation funding will be more difficult than in past years.

Is there anything in your life you think would be better if government bureaucrats funded it? For most of us, the answer is a laughable “no.” Take one example, our two largest government-run health programs – Medicare and Medicaid – both are on fiscal crash courses that make Social Security seem like a model of solvency.

The cost of healthcare has been raising four times the rate of inflation. Every day we stay with the present runaway system ensures that Americans will pay more money for less care. The dwindling number of doctors who accept Medicare patients resent politicians and government bureaucrats threatening their fees and meddling with their judgment. More government bureaucrats involved in your healthcare would be destructive. Just take a look at other countries with similar systems – they face lengthy and often deadly waiting lines for health treatments.

The baby boomers will begin to hit 65 in 2010, adding huge burdens to the Medicare system, which basically involves the transfer of costs from the young to serve the old. Healthcare is mostly for people over 65, while most of the payments come from taxes on younger people. A new study in 2007 found that nearly two thirds of adults either struggled to pay their medical bills or went without needed care because they couldn’t afford it.

It is a frightening proposition to think our government will come up with a solution to this critical problem. A delivery system that allows private and public programs to flourish concurrently is more likely to yield new and better practices to emulate elsewhere. We can’t afford to delay health reform, but it remains a prescription for more headaches when deciding who will be leading the reform – our bureaucratic system that has a poor track record in running successful and efficient programs, or the practitioners and providers who obviously have a vested interest in making a profit from the system. And the patient, who is in the middle of the tug of war, deserves health care that is adequate, expeditious, and affordable.

Oregon State Grange is working on three issues - animal welfare, abandonment of horses, and transferable development credit systems. The proposed animal welfare legislation would create a new category of criminal offense if an investigating officer finds incriminating evidence that a human has sexually assaulted an animal. The Oregon “Sex Crime” statute would also be amended to include that person as a sex offender, subject to all current limitations on the activities of other sex offenders in Oregon. The legislation includes further amendments that were proposed in the last three or four legislative sessions where there was an effort to directly connect animal abuse with child or person abuse.

The Oregon Senate Judiciary Committee held a work session on legislation that modifies the crime of animal abandonment to include abandonment of equines. This bill was amended to require “minimum care” in place of continued care when abandoned, and defines a “Domestic Animal” as an animal, other than livestock or equines owned or possessed by a person. “Equine” is defined as a “horse, pony, donkey, mule, zebra, or a hybrid of any of these animals.” Abandonment will carry a Class B misdemeanor penalty when convicted. The Oregon House Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Communities Committee held a work session on legislation authorizing governmental units to implement systems for buying and selling transferable development credits encouraging landowners to voluntarily protect resource lands. The “Transferable Development Credit” system would provide incentives for an owner of resource land outside an urban growth boundary to voluntarily limit development on the resource land and accommodate foregone development on lands within urban areas.

“Cornucopia” means a horn of plenty, abundance. Each February the PA Council of Farm Organizations holds a reception for all legislators in the Capitol to showcase the abundance of agricultural products grown and produced in PA. The PA State Grange had a display again this year and served homemade brownies to a large group of legislators who attended. Commodity groups served PA products such as cheese, grape juice, sliced beef, venison bologna, deviled eggs, vegetables, and lots of other great food.

The afternoon program featured a panel discussion on immigration issues from the agricultural perspective, with a speaker from the landscape and nursery industry, a vegetable grower, and a Christmas tree grower. In spite of several years of discussion in Washington, the immigration issue still has not been resolved and all types of farmers cannot find enough workers to be assured of harvesting their crops at the proper times. With the other pressing issues in Washington, DC, immigration is not likely to be discussed this year, but we need to keep pressing our Congressmen for a resolution to this problem that will affect our access to U.S. grown foods.

American farms are still being passed down from generation to generation because those families love the land. Two percent of American farmers feed 100% of the people. They are men and women, many college graduates, who have gained “on the job” knowledge and make a difference in the lives of millions of people. We must support these individuals and protect our precious farmland.

As times get harder for everyone in the U.S., the farmer is also facing challenges with higher fuel costs, cost of equipment repair and replacement, etc., but prices for his crops are not increasing at the same rate. We must continue a strong domestic farm to market food chain to ensure global independence.