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“HELP FOR THE FAMILY FARMERS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Senate section on pages S7652-S7653 on June 5, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
HELP FOR THE FAMILY FARMERS
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, last week, when the Senate was not in session and we had no votes, I was in North Dakota. In part of my visit to North Dakota, I visited my home county of Hettinger County, a relatively small county in southwestern North Dakota. It is down in ranching country, and there are also small farms. They raise a substantial amount of wheat.
I was reminded of the circumstances of rural America again. My home county lost 20 percent of its population in the 1980's, and it lost another 11 percent of its population in the first half of the 1990's. The fact is that rural counties--and, yes, Hettinger County, ND--is shrinking like a prune.
The farm bill that we have in this country to try to help family farmers is not working. At least it is not working to keep family farmers on the farm and make a decent living doing so. We are losing ground in rural America.
It is a paradox that our cities are more crowded and exhibit all of the problems of overcrowding at the same time that my home county, and virtually every rural county throughout the Farm Belt, is losing population.
We are told that this is a global economy and that there are these dislocations. In a global economy, we are told, there are some winners and there are some losers, and rural areas are losers. I do not understand why a global economy means that the big get bigger and the rich get richer and the rest somehow get hurt; the small do not make it. I do not understand that. That is not an economy that makes sense to me. That is not an economy that equates reward with effort.
It seems to me that we ought to have an economy that rewards less speculation and rewards more real production. Yet, the economy does not seem to do that. It is a high time these days on Wall Street, as all of us know, but it is hard times on Main Street of Hettinger County and small towns trying to make a go of it.
We have in a global economy the spectacle of American jobs going overseas, and those jobs that are left here are jobs paying less with fewer benefits. It is, we are told, a function of the global economy, the economy of economic realities.
Well, it is not an economic reality which I am prepared to accept. I do not think the people of the Farm Belt are prepared to accept it either.
We learned long ago in this country that just like the wagon trains that forged west, you do not move ahead by leaving some behind. That was a good lesson from the wagon trains because it is the only way they could survive, and it is still a good lesson for our country today. We cannot, as a country, move ahead while leaving some behind.
I think that as we discuss this year the construction of a new 5-year farm bill, we ought to think about that, what works to give family farmers in America a decent opportunity to make a living so that we do not see this exodus of the family farm to the major cities where overcrowding already exists.
Well, the farm bill will be written now in the next 60 or 80 days, and the question is: What will it be? If it is like the last two farm bills, it will be the same but less of it. So it will be less of the same. So you take something that simply does not work and say let us do less of it. It is a concept that does not make much sense to me.
The farm bill ought to be a farm bill that cares about family farmers and, if it does not, we ought not to have a farm bill at all; we do not need it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was founded under Abraham Lincoln in the 1860's with nine employees. That behemoth now has over 100,000 employees. In the last 15 years, we had about a 25-percent decrease in farm population--that is, the number of people living on farms--and about a 28-percent increase in the number of people running the farm program. It not only does not work, it is so frightfully complicated that nobody in this country fully understands it.
So why do we not do it differently and construct a new farm program that has as its preamble one central tenet, which is that we have a farm program in this country to try to give an opportunity to family-
size farms to make a living.
Why is that necessary? Well, corporate agrifactories can farm successfully because they have the economic strength to withstand two risks that farmers face. The first is the risk that you may not get a crop. You might have excessive rain or hail or insects. You might plant a crop and get nothing.
The second risk is, if you get the crop, you may not get a price, because, in the meantime, international grain prices for wheat or barley may have plummeted, and so you have a crop but no price. Those two risks are risks that the big agrifactories can stomach and can overcome, but family-size farms do not have the financial strength to do so.
So if we want in this country family farms producing our food, then we must have some kind of a farm program. It is that simple.
Now, should the farm program be one that rewards the big folks at the expense of the little folks? I do not think so. We have had a fundamental disconnection in the kind of farm program that we have had in this country.
We have believed that we can control the supply of grain and therefore increase price. In order to do that, you want all of the farmers in the country in the farm program, which means you especially want the big farmers. If you get the big farmers in the farm program, you spend most of your money on the big farmers. So most of the money for the farm program has gone to the big farmers.
The fact is that we have not controlled supply and we have not affected price. Why? Because we plant less in this country and Canada plants more,
Argentina plants more, the French plant more. So, it is a fundamentally flawed strategy.
We should decide now to disconnect from it and not do any of that. We should decide that the farm program ought to be a mechanism by which we will provide decent prices to the output of a family-size farm.
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In the current farm program there is a circumstance where the Prince of Liechtenstein was paid farm program benefits to a farm in Texas. Does anybody think the Prince of Liechtenstein is a Texas farmer? Of course not.
We had a bunch of Texans, a farmer coalition, so they could farm in Montana. They plowed a bunch of ground and seeded it by helicopter. They were not farming the land. They were farming the farm program, so they could get $20,000, $40,000, or 50,000 payments each.
We have a national newsman in this country that everyone probably has read about recently--who I assume lives in Washington, DC--gets $90,000 under the wool and mohair program. I bet that newsman does not live with the sheep most of the year. He is living in Washington, DC, or New York City. It seems to me the farm program ought to be targeted to family-size farms.
Now what I propose is a new approach, and I hope the Senate Agriculture Committee will look at it. I think it will do the right thing and save the Government money. I propose we structure farm program price benefits or farm program price supports or the safety net for farm programs, so that the strongest price goes to the first increment of production.
We say if a farmer raises 20,000 bushels of wheat, we provide a price of $4.50 a bushel. We hope the farmer gets money from the marketplace, but if not, we provide $4.50 for the bushel for the first 20,000 bushels of wheat, and that is all the money we have. We are sorry. If they want to farm the whole county, God bless you, they have every right to farm the whole county, but the Federal Government does not have to be the financial partner beyond the first 20,000 bushels. If a farmer wants to farm beyond that level, they are on their own.
That ought to be the case in all farm programs.
In the dairy program, I have never understood, for example, why there is need to support a dairy operation in California that milks 3,500 cows every day. I do not know if anybody here has milked a cow. I have milked a cow, but if you milk 3,500 cows a day and get a price support under every gallon of milk you pull from the cows, that just does not make sense.
It seems to me if we have price supports for milk, we say we might provide a decent price support for the milk from 80 cows. That is hard work for a farmer running a farm. However, if a farmer wants to buy the 81st cow, guess what? When they sit on the milk stool, do a little milking, those farmers would be milking on their own risk.
I think that is what we ought to do with the farm program. If we are not willing to recognize that the farm program is one that is designed to try to help the family farmers stay on the farm--and those are important things to care about from social and economic policy reasons--if that is not the purpose of it, I say we should get rid of the farm program.
We do not need to provide a stimulant for corporate agrifactories to plow. They will plow. Corporations will plow the whole country. As soon as they have plowed the whole country and cornered the supply of food, guess what? Go to the grocery store and see what the price of food will be. The corporations of this country will darn sure make certain that consumers would be paying well above the cost of production for food.
Of course, now we do not do that. We go to the store and buy a box of elbow macaroni. Let us see how that relates to the price of durum wheat. Somebody out on a farm raises durum wheat and he grinds it into semolina flour, and the semolina flour is produced into elbow macaroni.
I can show when the price of durum wheat goes down 2 bucks a bushel, the price of elbow macaroni goes up. I can show when the price of wheat goes down the price of cereal goes up. I can show that the snap, crackle, and pop in Rice Krispies often brings more to the people that produce the snap and the crackle, than the person that produces the rice.
It is the same with puffed wheat. The puffer gets more than the wheat. It is the same with corn flakes. The flaker gets more than the person that rides the tractor and raises the corn.
That is the way things have worked. It is not right.
We have an opportunity this year to write a farm program that produces the right result. Now for social and economic reasons, this country ought to care about who produces its foodstuffs. It ought to care about the Farm Belt. It ought to care about preserving a network of family farmers. For that reason, we ought to have a safety net--not for a set of golden arches or for the largest agrifactories--but, a safety net for family farmers.
We can do that. We can do it in a responsible and reasonable way--and we can save the taxpayers' money at the same time--if we simply decide the current farm program is not working and we construct a new farm program, a better farm program, one that gives some hope to family farmers for a change.
It is interesting that with all the discussion around this town about reform and reinventing, the odds are that unless things change in the next 60 or 80 days, we will see the same old tired, failed policies with respect to agriculture.
I hope that the proposal that I am making this year--the legislative proposal for targeting farm program support prices to family-sized farms--and the roles by others that try to really substantially reform the farm program will this year give us a change. It does not make sense to do less of the same, when the same does not work.
Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. PRESSLER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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