Midsummer is not the best time of year to visit specialty-crop growers up and down the Lower Peninsula’s sandy west coast. Still, even rushed summertime conversations can betray key truths about the relationship between Farm Bureau and its members — especially those unfazed by stepping into vital local leadership roles.
Anyway there’s your setting: It’s summertime in western Michigan and Alex Overhiser is mostly through Year One in his dad’s shoes. When I stopped recently to chat, the Allegan County Farm Bureau’s young president was shaking a block of tart cherry trees I’ll politely describe as “mature.”
After one of them releases an especially light yield, Overhiser yells out over the idling shaker: “OLD TREES!”
Did he really even have time to talk? No: It’s late June and the man’s driving a cherry shaker. It was a short conversation.
“How goes the presidency?” I asked.
His ready response was so plain I didn’t even write it down, but the gist of it was “okay” and/or “fine I guess” — not exactly a cry for help or complaint about the demands of leadership, even in his first year. To the contrary, Alex was smiling and chatty.
To date his biggest challenge leading Allegan’s 1,400 regular members has been the dichotomy that’ll always split their ranks — the same story for most lakeside counties: Thanks to the lake itself, farming coastal townships is dramatically different from farming inland.
Sandy soils and a moderated climate makes the lakeshore prime territory for fruit and vegetable cultivation, while varied ground and more extreme temps inland are better suited to traditional row crops and livestock. That means coastal counties like Allegan are home to a minority of specialty croppers — like the Overhiser clan — while the majority of Farm Bureau members are raising more standard fare inland.
One exception to that rule is the fabled Fruit Ridge, rolling north and west of Grand Rapids across parts of Kent, Muskegon, Newaygo and Ottawa counties. That’s where, after letting Young Overhiser get back to his cherries, we found Adam Dietrich in-between chores as the countdown to apple season gets louder.
Since honing his leadership skills in the Young Farmer program — including as chair, meaning a year representing the program on the state board of directors — Dietrich is now in his second year as Ottawa County president. That experience, coupled with his coolly reserved demeanor, means Adam barely shrugged at the same question about how the role suits him.
Was it just the time of year — late cherries will soon give way to early apples — that made these two young leaders men of few words? Maybe, but their reticence about leading their county Farm Bureaus wasn’t their only commonality.
I asked both the same stock question about the value of Farm Bureau membership — What do your $50 dues get you? — and they responded the same: Representation.
“Farm Bureau is our voice,” Overhiser said — or maybe it was Dietrich — because fruit ripens when fruit ripens, and if your livelihood depends on getting those tanks and bins to the processor or packager on time, you can’t take a day off to testify in Lansing or Washington.
That’s why Farm Bureau’s system works for all growers — inland or coastal — all their commodities, despite all their schedule conflicts: When you can’t step up in person, your peers and staff can, armed with your collective priorities in the form of MFB’s policy book.
There, finally, is the moral of this short story: Policy Development is your disembodied voice — your spray drone — your remote control, at the helm, calling the shots as you want them called.
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