President - Steve Appel

A third-generation family farmer, Steve Appel grows wheat and barley in the fertile Palouse region of southeast Washington state.

Mr. Appel has served as President of Washington Farm Bureau (WFB) since 1994. In that capacity, he represents the state’s largest and oldest general agriculture organization with over 35,000 member families. Mr. Appel is the longest-serving state President in Washington Farm Bureau’s history. Under his leadership, WFB launched an association health plan and industrial insurance safety and health program, which have become the second largest in the state, providing health insurance and workplace safety services to rural Washingtonians where such services were previously unavailable. The success of these efforts is evident in the continued growth of the organization during Mr. Appel’s tenure. In fact, Washington Farm Bureau has experienced 85 percent membership growth during the past five years alone.

Mr. Appel is also President of the Washington Agriculture Legal Foundation board of directors and serves on the Eastern Washington Advisory Committee for the Washington Policy Center, a non-partisan, free-market think tank.

He is a graduate of Washington State University, and he has worked tirelessly to promote U.S. agriculture and America’s family farmers and ranchers at home and abroad.

In addition to his Washington Farm Bureau duties, Mr. Appel served for seven years (2001-2007) as Vice President of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), the world’s largest general agriculture organization with more than 6 million member families.  He was the first farmer from the Pacific Northwest to serve as an officer of that organization. In this position, Mr. Appel represented America’s farmers and ranchers on issues of national and international importance. 

He has testified before several congressional committees, including the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture, Committee on Ways & Means, Committee on Small Business, and Committee on Resources, as well as its Subcommittee on National Parks & Public Lands and Subcommittee on Water & Power. Mr. Appel has also testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry.

As a farmer who exports his crops, Mr. Appel is actively engaged in trade issues, having represented the American Farm Bureau Federation in meetings with the World Trade Organization, U.S. producer organizations and foreign trade delegations such as the North America-European Union agricultural meeting in Quebec and International Federation of Agricultural Producers meetings in Germany and the Philippines. He is a past co-chairman of AFBF’s trade advisory committee and has participated in trade missions to Cuba and Mexico seeking to expand trade opportunities between the U.S. and Latin America.

Mr. Appel is an active member of his local community having previously served on the Whitman County Planning Commission and Whitman County Soil Conservation Board.