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Whether it be helping prospective candidates decide if public office is for them, or interviewing those already on the ballot to help counties decide if they want to support a specific candidate, or informing voters about judicial races, Ohio Farm Bureau’s Government Affairs staff has been quite involved in the political arena throughout 2002.

Members were urged to plan ahead for the November election by making sure they were registered to vote and by taking action to get an absentee ballot if they weren’t going to be in the county on Election Day.

In encouraging voter registration, Deering Dyer, OFBF's director of political education, said, "A lot of our successes in the legislature and in Congress depend on us putting the people we think will be friendly to agriculture into those positions of power."

OFBF worked with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business-Ohio, Nationwide and the Ohio Insurance Institute to co-sponsor a Campaign Management Seminar.

The program, conducted by American Farm Bureau staff, included information about campaign organizations, fund raising, message development and grassroots targeting. This bipartisan campaign management training seminar was developed by AFBF with input from political consultants and staff of both major political parties.

For details about the 2003 candidate management seminar, contact your county Farm Bureau office.

County Farm Bureaus worked with OFBF Government Affairs staff to hold screening sessions that identified potential members of or candidates for the General Assembly who were deserving of being recognized as "Friends of Farm Bureau."

Several races were targeted, and candidates for those seats completed a questionnaire compiled by OFBF and other business organizations. Office seekers who returned their surveys met with county Farm Bureau panels. From those meetings, Farm Bureau leaders chose whom to support, and what kind of support to offer.

"A lot of other associations choose their endorsements from their state offices, but in Ohio Farm Bureau, we don’t operate that way," Dyer said. "We’re a grassroots organization, so the counties comprising these legislative districts send representatives to the screening committee, and they actually interview these candidates in the targeted races. Then, at the end of the interviews, they decide if they want to be involved in the race."

Farm Bureau’s blessing brings a lot of help to the potential legislator’s campaign, according to Dyer. "It includes a small contribution from our political action committee, and most importantly, the county Farm Bureaus have taken ownership in deciding that this is an agriculture-friendly candidate. The county groups often choose to get involved with literature mailings, door-to-door visits and grassroots activities to help get that person elected."

Not all statehouse races were screened, Dyer said. Open seat races, where both candidates were new and neither had an existing relationship with Farm Bureau, were analyzed. The second type of race screened was where reapportionment pitted two deserving candidates against each other. "Through the recent redrawing of legislative district lines we had some instances where we had a friend of agriculture vs. another friend of agriculture in the same district so the counties had to make a decision on who to support," Dyer said.

Farm Bureau took a strong look at district appellate court races and the Ohio Supreme Court elections in the November election. A series of articles were prepared for Buckeye Farm News in which members were informed of the importance of judicial races, how to get information about candidates, earned who was running for which seats, and learned that OFBF supported the Supreme Court candidacies of Maureen O’Connor and Evelyn Stratton. Stratton and O'Connor were elected to the Court.