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District Discussion & Pre-Survey Results
Presidents Conference
• Water quality
• Road conditions with larger manure hauling
• Commodity groups and CAFO farms gearing up for a potential lawsuit
• Regulation of industry
• Representing all sectors of industry
• How do we get young people involved if regulated out of business?
• More specialty in ag tourism operations; Support for Small Farms Conference; fewer dairy operations and tradition agriculture; more wineries popping up; competing organizations providing education and continued learning, but not in legislative field; keeping ag viable and profitable; increase in CSAs; much older crowd, and not many younger people joining, farming, or being involved
• Lack of slaughter facilities
• Manure equipment size
• Declining population
Does your county have a leadership succession plan? If yes, what is it? If no, discuss ideas to put one in place. Are you using nominating committees to surface new board members?
• Grooming VP/3rd member to chair meetings. Chairs report to the board, check bylaws on timeline (reduce last minute recruiting)
• Create delegate (year round) training at district level instead of just the Tuesday morning before SAM
• DiSC training for boards or executive committees
• Most counties have a nominating committee but no leadership succession plan besides and informal under- standing of finding the right people to serve in roles that match their goals
• Great YF group
• Committee Meeting day used to create plan of work for each committee throughout the year and introduce members to committee work
• Board members work together to identify replacements, which turns into recycling former board members rather than bringing new folks in
• Need to surface new leaders to think out of the box
• Term limits – some counties have them, others do not
• Funding the County Farm Bureau
• Not using designated nominating committee, just asking members; looking at membership list to identify by board members not up for election; Young Farmers involved not interested in being on board; wants to have succession plan in place before resigning from the board
• Many counties do not have a leadership succession plan
What are your biggest concerns in your county (question from pre-conference survey)?”:
• Gaining more active members as well as new members (4)
• Getting younger people on the board to help maybe attract the young farmers in our county. We have a very limited amount of young farmer involvement and young farmers in general. How do we get the young farm- ers’ attention?
• The next generation of farmers - how do we keep the family farms and keep investors from buying up the land when the young farmer can’t compete with them?
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