Two agricultural trade association CEOs with a combined 57 years at their organizations — 44 at the American Sugar Beet Growers Association and 13 at the Corn Refiners Association — are stepping down as tariff policy and near-25% projected House turnover complicate advocacy for grower groups.

Luther Markwart, executive vice president and CEO of ASBA, leaves at the end of the year after 44 seasons on the job plus three as a regional sugarbeet grower representative for Michigan and Ohio. John Bode departs his post as president and CEO of the Corn Refiners Association at the end of January. Bode has worked on every farm bill since 1981, including stints on the Senate Agriculture Committee staff, at USDA and in private practice at Olsson Frank Weeda.

Both men say relationships and respect for opposing viewpoints anchor effective advocacy.

"The first principle is you want a good personal relationship with them. What that's based on is honesty and trust," Markwart says of dealing with congressional lawmakers and staffers. "Typically, when we visit with people we say, 'Look, I'm laying this out for you. You're going to hear from our opponents, and here's what they're going to say... And so there are no surprises."

Bode frames the same lesson differently. "Each organization, each person I work with, comes with their own perspective, and it's very rational," he says. "We may disagree, but there are good reasons for that disagreement, and respecting that is the key for finding commonity and working together as much as possible."

Markwart adds: "You need to have a 'nice' factor. Just be nice. And particularly in today's harsh environment... Do your homework. Follow up. Talk to people in ways that they can understand the issue," without being too technical.

The congressional landscape shifts every two years, and this midterm election could produce close to 25% turnover in the House. "Whenever you get a new Congress, all those new offices for the first several months are getting staff in place," Markwart says. "They're trying to figure out where their parking spots are."

Once ag staffers settle in, sugarbeet growers must explain their relevance to districts with no beets. Markwart points to distribution-center maps: "We're not in a lot of places... If you look at a map that shows all of our distribution centers, it shows where we move sugar and hold it, so when customers need things, it's within a day's truck drive or a rail."

Bode notes a structural change in corporate Washington. In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus was compliance with government requirements; today, "government actions are a key determinant in business strategy, and so the top lobbyists, the top trade associations, have more exposure to business leaders than they have in the past."

Both are circumspect on tariffs. "He's using the tariff structures to do it because it is the one tool, the one piece of leverage — as difficult and tough as it is, it's the one tool you can leverage other countries to make concessions," Markwart says of the president's approach to trade deficits. "It's a work in progress... whether it works or doesn't work, that's for history to determine."

Bode says the CRA focus has shifted from leveraging trade agreements and enforcement to simply tracking tariffs in a fast-moving information environment. "It used to be the three networks and leading papers, and now every voter seems to choose their news source," he says, adding that fragmented media has fueled populism and produced "a less predictable policy environment."

Speed now shapes governance too. "Today, if I got something this morning, I could have a call this afternoon and a decision by mid-afternoon," Markwart says. "And now with Zoom, they can be in their cars, their tractors."

Markwart counts the 2008 commercialization of Roundup-resistant sugarbeets as his biggest accomplishment. At the International Sweetener Symposium in Vail, Colorado, in August, he recounted a call from Monsanto: "We've had a couple losses, and our company cannot afford another loss. We're not going to do sugarbeets." He flew to St. Louis the next day and, with Tom Schwartz of the Sugar Beet Development Foundation, persuaded the company to continue. "It is the fastest adoption of any biotech crop anywhere in the world," he says. He and Schwartz received the Savitsky Award from the American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists in 2017.

His biggest disappointment: the farm bill safety net. "We were unable to get stronger safety nets — getting our loan rate increased at higher levels when [we] needed it," he says. "We closed a lot of factories throughout the country."

Bode cites improved relations with the sugar industry and CRA's seed money for the Plant Based Products Council. He wants a more ambitious bioeconomy agenda going forward: "It builds demand for agricultural products, [including] new manufacturing jobs of national security importance."