The Vulture, the Mealybug and the Deer: Texas Farm Bureau's 2027 Pest Agenda

Forty-one members of the Texas Farm Bureau spent two days in Waco at the start of November consolidating more than 200 resolutions submitted by county chapters, and when the pile came out the other side, a handful of the survivors were about animals that farmers cannot shoot, spray or fence out.

The Resolutions Committee met Nov. 2-3. Its product goes to the voting delegates at the bureau's 93rd annual meeting, Dec. 4-6, also in Waco, where state resolutions become organizational policy and national ones get forwarded to the American Farm Bureau Federation in January. Committee chair Warren Cude, the bureau's vice president, described the process the way the organization always does — everything starts at the county level and works its way up.

Three items on that ladder matter to anyone who sells pest or wildlife service in rural Texas.

The first is black vultures. The committee, in the release summarizing its work, "supported removing federal protections for black vultures and researching additional control methods to reduce damage to livestock." That is a short sentence for a long-running fight. Black vultures are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which is why a rancher who wants to kill one has to go through a federal depredation permit rather than simply doing it. The birds are also not the harmless scavengers their cousins are. Turkey vultures find carrion by smell and eat it. Black vultures find it by sight, arrive in groups, and are the species producers blame for opening up cows and ewes at the moment of birth — eyes, navel, tongue — and for finishing off animals that are down but not yet dead.

Whether a resolution can change a treaty is doubtful. What it can do is tell the bureau's lobbyists where to spend attention, and it signals that the permit route has not satisfied the membership. Nothing in the committee's summary proposes an alternative mechanism, and no bill text exists yet; this is a position, not a rulemaking.

The second item is a bug most Texans have never heard of and will hear more about. The committee endorsed "additional federal research on pasture mealybug," a small sap-feeding insect that does its damage in a way that looks like weather. Infested grass yellows, thins and stops growing in patches that read as drought stress, which is exactly why the pest gets diagnosed late. Oklahoma State University Extension specialists spent part of last week telling producers in that state how to scout for it, and one of them, Ashleigh Faris, said Texas first noticed the insect in 2025 even though older extension reports suggest it had been around longer. AgriLife awarded new grants to study it this fall. Asking for federal research money is the agricultural equivalent of asking for a bigger fire department: recognition that the problem has outgrown the state's own capacity to study it.

The third is deer, and it is the one with the widest practical reach. The committee "supported encouraging the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to improve methods for estimating deer populations and establishing appropriate population levels to help reduce agricultural damage caused by overpopulated deer herds." Translation: the bureau believes the state's deer numbers are higher than the state's estimates, and that the difference is being paid for in crops. TPWD sets the seasons and the bag limits; the bureau is asking it to aim those tools at damage rather than at opportunity.

The rest of the agenda explains the meeting's shape. Members wanted data centers to disclose projected water use to counties, groundwater districts and the Texas Water Development Board, and opposed giving data centers special status that could carry eminent domain. They opposed new transmission lines of 345 kilovolts or greater unless need is demonstrated and landowners get a say, and supported incentives for solar developers to build around grazing and cropping rather than over it. There were resolutions on oil and gas reserve pits, on light pollution, on public notice for weather modification. A farm bureau resolutions committee is a machine for turning local irritations into statewide language, and the machine ran on water this year.

For the pest control trade, the interesting thing is the company these three items keep. A vulture resolution is a wildlife-control argument that has run out of permits. A mealybug resolution is a research-funding argument about a pest that hides inside drought. A deer resolution is a population-management argument about an animal the state manages for hunters. All three are the same complaint in different clothes: the tools available to a landowner are too slow, too narrow, or aimed at somebody else's priority.

Delegates take them up in three weeks. If the vulture and mealybug language survives the December vote, expect to see both again in Washington in January, attached to an organization that represents the state with the most farmland in the country.