You’ve been training for this your whole life.
Safe bet the bulk of Farm Bureau members reading this arrived here via a path that looks something like this: You grew up on your family’s farm, cut your teeth in 4-H, refined and sharpened some through FFA, and maybe even took an ag program at Michigan State.
From there you joined Farm Bureau at some point and were asked to maybe help with a project, encouraged to test your savvy in a discussion meet, maybe even joined a committee or two or twelve.
From showing pigs at the fair to learning how to run a meeting, institutions like 4-H, FFA and Farm Bureau exist in part to identify and coach up effective, outgoing leaders. Some lucky individuals are born with these qualities; the rest of us schmucks have to learn them the hard way.
Either way, if you want to be part of the team moving the needle of public opinion in electing more farm-friendly politicians, it’s time to flex some of the skills you’ve been acquiring since turning in your earliest 4-H project.
Today’s example: I asked Barry County’s Mick Kokx — bluntly — how Farm Bureau’s rank-n-file membership can move the electoral needle. After two-plus decades of active involvement in policy and politics, Mick should know, right?
Yes and no.
“That’s hard to answer,” he responded, just as bluntly as I’d asked. “I don’t know how.”
But Mick’s a talker so he kept talking and hit the bullseye real quick.
“Farmers have got to talk to people, basically. That’s what they’ve got to do,” he said. “Farmers don’t always like to talk to people — that’s one of their biggest problems. They’ll talk to their own but not to outsiders.
"You’ve just got to be a little more proactive.”
His willingness to say even that much indicates Mick is among the minority of farmers who are comfortable striking up a conversation, and doing it with the kind of passionate enthusiasm that can blossom into effective persuasion, even when things get political.
And just like he went from I-don’t-know to this-is-how in less than a minute, Kokx has a good bead on how he got that way: He learned it. He was trained.
“When I grew up I had a schoolteacher for a mother, and our farm always had schoolkids from Muskegon visit every spring when we had lambs,” Kokx said, and welcoming groups of city kids onto the farm provided him some valuable early lessons in how to communicate with ‘outsiders.’
“Also I had a real good ag teacher,” he recalled. “We did discussion meets, learned parliamentary procedure, leadership skills…”
Later in life — in the fabled “real world” beyond the classroom — continued, workaday interaction with non-ag people further honed his readiness to engage with folks outside his immediate circle.
And ever since he’s kept sliding down that slippery slope as an engaged, effective county Farm Bureau leader — board member, policy developer, past president — and as a chatty pumpkin seller.
“The kids at our stand don’t always want grandpa up there because he talks too much,” he said, chuckling. “If you’re going to succeed with a farm stand you’ve got to be somewhat of a people person. You’ve got to talk to people.
“And if I’ve got a story to tell, I’m gonna tell it: I’m telling my story.”