By Chamber Business News
As part of its ongoing examination of Arizona groundwater policy, Chamber Business News is visiting with water experts and policy leaders about their views on groundwater and what they believe are the defining issues for one of the state’s most pressing challenges.
Today CBN visits with Chelsea McGuire, director of government relations for the Arizona Farm Bureau.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Chamber Business News: Chelsea, tell us about your job at the Arizona Farm Bureau and Farm Bureau’s structure.
Chelsea McGuire: I am the director of government relations at the Arizona Farm Bureau. It’s my job to put our Farm Bureau members who are farmers and ranchers in front of the right decision-makers they need to talk to when they’re facing an issue. That could be state legislators, other types of regulators, it could be state agencies.
One of the things that we are really proud of and really protective of is our grassroots structure. Every county in Arizona has an active county Farm Bureau. And those county farm bureaus are all members of the state Farm Bureau, which is the organization I work for. Those county members are the producers of food and fiber in this state who’ve come together and said they want to be part of an organization that can represent farmers from an advocacy perspective and then also from a communications and education perspective. Everything that we do is driven by our grassroots membership.
