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From abortion to state constitutional amendments, the nation’s largest farm group is using their money and platform to influence elections
On August 4, Missourians overwhelmingly rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have limited the ability of voters to pass citizen-led amendments.
The Missouri Farm Bureau strongly backed Amendment 4, which would have required any citizen-led ballot measure to obtain a majority vote in each of Missouri’s eight congressional districts, instead of the current requirement of a simple majority of all voters in the state.
But when the votes were counted, the Farm Bureau showed how fringe some of its positions really are.
Not a single county in Missouri voted to approve Amendment 4, which was rejected by 80% of voters. The Missouri Farm Bureau PAC spent at least $10,000 in favor of the amendment, one of four on the ballot.
Across the country, state Farm Bureaus play a role in influencing elections through endorsements, lobbying efforts and funding candidates through political action committees (PACs). Critics of the Farm Bureau, which calls itself the “voice of agriculture,” say the organization primarily represents corporate agriculture interest groups, not the family farmers it claims to support.
Are the split results of ballot measure passage a sign that the Farm Bureau is losing its hold in rural America?
The Missouri Farm Bureau’s other election efforts were mainly positive. The Missouri Farm Bureau PAC endorsed six candidates for U.S. House, all Republicans. All but one advanced out of the primary. Six out of eight candidates it endorsed for the state senate—again, all Republican—won their primary.
The Missouri Farm Bureau also spent $10,000 in favor of Amendment 1 to support a 0.1% sales tax that funds soil and water conservation and state parks. Missourians strongly approved of Amendment 1, with 83% voting in favor. Amendment 1 increase taxes, but rather approved the continuance of a current tax that generates an estimated $140 million annually, according to the Secretary of State’s website. These tax dollars are also used to pay farmers and landowners to implement conservation practices.
“While we are disappointed by the sound defeat of Amendment 4,” said Janet Adkison, Missouri Farm Bureau’s Director of Public Affairs and Advocacy in an email to Barn Raiser after the primary, “we are equally encouraged by the overwhelming passage of Amendment 1 with more than 80% of the vote, an unprecedented level of support that exceeded expectations for this election cycle.”
She explained that this is a long game for the organization:
“This campaign was never about one election. It was about a fundamental principle our membership identified as a priority nearly 40 years ago: [Missouri’s] Constitution should serve as the framework for governing our state, not as a vehicle for advancing the business plans or political agendas of well-funded special interests.”
Missouri: A case study
In 1915, Missouri became the first statewide organized Farm Bureau. Four years later, the American Farm Bureau was founded by farmers from 34 states who met in Chicago. What started as an organization that disseminated research to growers has turned into the country’s largest general farm organization. Its growth was propelled by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 that laid the groundwork for states to attach extension services at ag universities to local farm organizations, often called farm bureaus. Its immense financial power comes largely from insurance products.
By the 1930s, as farm cooperatives promoted by the National Farmers Union grew in popularity, the American Farm Bureau Federation, supported by federal law and new agribusiness enterprises, became the political alternative to the National Farmers Union and its promotion of what the American Farm Bureau called “Bolshevism.” Today the American Farm Bureau and its allies are the largest funders of agribusiness lobbyists in the country.
So why would the Missouri Farm Bureau throw its weight behind Amendment 4, a ballot measure that has little to do with agriculture?
“We have the chance to vote on a very important measure,” current Missouri Farm Bureau (MOFB) president Garrett Hawkins said on Diggin’ In, a podcast by the Missouri Farm Bureau. “A once in a generation opportunity to better protect our state’s most sacred document,” he said, describing the state’s constitution.
Hawkins was speaking with former Missouri Farm Bureau President Charlie Kruse.
Kruse pointed to western states to make his argument for supporting Amendment 4 and the connection to agriculture.
“Heck, even in Colorado, a livestock state, you’ve seen an initiative which absolutely would have crippled their livestock sector,” he claimed, likely referring to the 2022 Colorado Initiative 16, also known as the PAUSE (Protect Animals from Unnecessary Suffering and Exploitation) initiative.
This initiative, which included banning farming practices such as artificial insemination, and allowed farm animals to live up to 25% of their expected lifespan before going to slaughter, was struck down by the courts for violating the Colorado constitution’s single-subject requirement before it could be put to a vote.
Kruse said it used to take the backing of the Missouri Farm Bureau to get an initiative on the ballot. Members would take their clipboards to their local Walmarts and preach their issues to customers and collect signatures.
“Fast forward to the last few years and it’s all a money game,” Kruse said.
On July 30, Hawkins published a commentary on the Missouri Farm Bureau website, titled “Our Constitution is not for sale,” stating his concerns about wealthy, out-of-state funding of citizen-led initiatives. “Across the country, well-funded special interests have used ballot initiative campaigns to advance policies that reshape state constitutions without broad public consensus,” Hawkins wrote. “Without stronger safeguards, nothing prevents another wave of outside money from attempting to reshape our state’s Constitution.”
The 2024 election in Missouri was shrouded in the conversation of “outside money” as constituents voted to enshrine the right to abortion, prohibit the implementation of ranked-choice voting in state and local elections, and increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour with requirements for paid sick leave, among other items. Missouri Farm Bureau “directly oppose[d]” the right to abortion and increase of the minimum wage, while it “directly support[ed]” the amendment to block ranked choice voting. It also specified that only U.S. citizens are entitled to vote and each voter can only cast a single vote each election, both of which the American electoral system already ensures but election deniers have made into an issue.
Only the blockage of ranked choice voting went the way Missouri Farm Bureau urged Missourians to vote. However, 21 counties with populations less than 100,000 people voted to raise the minimum wage and require paid sick leave. By August of 2025, the Republican super-majority repealed the paid sick leave component, walking back what 60% of voters statewide passed less than a year prior, an obvious disconnect between elected officials and the will of the people. Voters also overturned the legislature’s abortion ban in 2024 but Republicans legislators voted to put it back on the ballot in 2026.
“Dark money” is the language that surrounds funding that was poured into measures that opposed the views of the Missouri Farm Bureau. Hawkins poses this question at the end of his recent commentary article: “Who should decide Missouri’s future—Missourians, or the highest bidder?”
Since 2017, the political action committee (PAC) associated with Missouri Farm Bureau has given at least $34,000 to out-of-state candidates and causes. That amount pales in comparison to the money poured into ballot issues in the state’s last few election cycles.
The Missouri Farm Bureau PAC spent nearly $200,000 since 2018, including more than $80,000 supporting candidates in the 2023-24 election cycle, according to Open Secrets, an election finance tracking service. All of the federal candidates the Missouri Farm Bureau supported were Republicans.
Michael Slater, an agriculture teacher at Grand River Technical School and farmer in Trenton, Missouri says he sees the Farm Bureau messaging crop up around election time.
“I am not one to look at that and go, ‘Oh, well, Farm Bureau says this is how you should vote so I’m taking that to the ballot box,’ but I do pay attention to what they say,” he says, adding that his views on amendments 1 and 4, align with the Missouri Farm Bureau for the 2026 election.
“I’m not one hundred percent certain that [Amendment] 4 was the best solution, but it could have been a solution to the problem,” Slater says.
He believes the Missouri Farm Bureau could have a strong influence on voters, but the challenge, he says, is the hyper-polarization in politics. He sees the organization walking a fine line between advocating for issues and alienating members.
Farmers Union offers an alternative
“There’s more than one farmer perspective in Missouri,” says Kallie Turner, the Programs and Policy Director for the Missouri Farmers Union (MFU). The farmers union calls itself the “voice of family farmers” and often represents a smaller but more grassroots alternative to the Farm Bureau throughout the country. “Sometimes, the loudest group like Missouri Farm Bureau is not necessarily one that’s reflective of where most of our farmers and people land,” she says.
Turner says the landscape of farming in Missouri has changed over the last few years. More farms are consolidated and the barriers to enter farming have become much higher. She says some younger farmers have priorities not always aligned with the state Farm Bureau today.
This growth in young farmers is evident in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, which showed a 7% increase in farmers under 44. The largest jump was in producers under 25. The average age of farmers is still climbing though, now at 58.1, up 0.6 years from 2017.
In 2014, Missouri voted on a right to farm measure that pitted the Missouri Farm Bureau and the Missouri Farmers Union against each other. It passed with a 50.12% of the vote, setting off a recount. Like in 2026, the Missouri Farm Bureau backed the claim that the passage of the Right to Farm Measure would bulk up protections for farmers from out-of-state interests. The Missouri Farmers Union, the Sierra Club and former state senator and farmer Wes Shoemyer were among those who charged the so-called right to farm would in fact protect large corporate and multinational agribusiness.
“Supposedly designed to assure the right to farm for Missouri citizens, its vague wording is bound to favor corporations, even Chinese corporations, over Missouri family farms,” wrote then-Missouri Farmers Union President Richard R. Oswald in an editorial for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The Missouri Farmers Union generally does not endorse candidates, but it does advocate for policy change at the state capitol with the input of their members, Turner says. In several cases, the organization does align with the Missouri Farm Bureau on issues such as disaster relief and rural infrastructure.
“If it’s broadly supporting farms, I think we’re on the same page,” Turner says.
Most recently, both organizations supported the Grassley First Degree Amendment #4 to the Senate’s draft of the farm bill, which would codify the Department of Agriculture’s recently finalized Packers and Stockyards Act rules, according to a joint letter sent to U.S. Senators John Boozman and Amy Klobuchar.
Impact in other states
Missouri is one of many states in which the Farm Bureau has outsize influence.
The Kansas Farm Bureau’s PAC, called Voters Organized To Elect Farm Bureau Friends, endorsed candidates in the primary also held August 4. The organization consists of a 10-member board and has been endorsing candidates since 1993. It currently has $170,000 on hand for 2026 elections. Since January 1, 2025, nine out of 12 candidates they have given campaign funds to have been out-of-state candidates.
Nebraska is seeing a direct split in endorsements between the Farm Bureau and the Farmers Union. On July 23, both organizations released press releases endorsing their pick for U.S. Senate; the Nebraska Farm Bureau endorsed incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, while the Nebraska Farmers Union endorsed Independent Dan Osborn.
“Nebraska Farm Bureau is reminding Nebraskans that U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts is the only candidate who has received the endorsement of the state’s largest general farm and ranch organization,” the Nebraska Farm Bureau said. The Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation PAC has given $6,500 to Ricketts’s campaign since March 2025.
The Farmers Union’s endorsement was a rebuke of corporate campaign money in politics: “Dan Osborn’s independent campaign is a breath of fresh air relative to campaign spending and support for campaign financing reforms.”
The Iowa Farm Bureau is one of the most powerful and well-financed in the country as reported in a 2022 Civil Eats article:
Powerful interest groups—primarily the Iowa Farm Bureau, which spends up to $350 million lobbying state and federal legislatures every year—perpetuate the narrative that the state’s economy depends on the well-being of farmers and that any form of regulation constitutes an attack on agriculture itself.
A 2024 investigation by Investigate Midwest dug into the Farm Bureau’s influence across the Midwest and how issues beyond agriculture have become key issues for the organization, aligning with some of their members and alienating others. This followed a 2021 Investigate Midwest investigation showing how nonprofit state farm bureaus have come to rely on the highly profitable investments from FBL Financial, the organization’s private insurance business, which had grown to more than a billion dollars. The Missouri Farm Bureau is second only to the Iowa Farm Bureau in terms of the percentage of its total revenue that comes from these investments.
“By not taking salaries and having their income tied to FBL’s performance, the Farm Bureau’s executives open themselves up to questions,” wrote the authors of the Investigate Midwest story. Protecting investment profits could be one reason for the Farm Bureau to take an interest in matters other than agriculture, even as the number of farms continue to decline and farmers struggle with low-to-negative profit margins and suffer with skyrocketing input prices and a market controlled by monopolistic corporations.
Issues unrelated to agriculture that the Farm Bureau chose to weigh in on included increasing election security laws, making state constitutional amendments harder to pass, limiting government services offered to immigrants, opposing “critical race theory,” reading the Bible and advocating for voluntary prayer in public school, and—in Missouri specifically—the recognition of only male and female genders in public schools.
Increasingly, people and organizations are speaking out against Farm Bureau influence.
Blue Missouri Executive Director Jess Piper put it bluntly on her Substack: “The Farm Bureau is not a small farmer’s organization or union. It’s an insurance company and lobbyist group. It’s evolved into an arm of the Republican Party.”
A 2014 article in The Atlantic charged Farm Bureaus with being “an overwhelmingly conservative, strongly Republican group,” that has gotten “what they wanted, between all that lobbying and politicians' never-ending appetite for paeans to the nobility of rural life.”
Even one of its own members, Heather Wright Wendel, a small-scale market farmer from Michigan, was quoted in the Missouri Independent describing Farm Bureau politics this way: “I’m basically helping them lobby, which doesn’t align with small-farm values. I feel like they’re out for large corporate interests.”
The influence of the Farm Bureau is unmistakable across the country, up and down ballots. Increased consolidation of farming operations has shrunk the pool of real farmers who cast votes in these elections. Many of those who remain are recognizing that the Farm Bureau at state and national levels has become increasingly more supportive of the corporate interests that are squeezing those same farmers and their rural communities. “Whose Side Is the American Farm Bureau On?” a 2012 headline in The Nation reads. “The answer—Big Ag.”
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