[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 130 (Tuesday, October 17, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10608-S10611]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AGRICULTURE APPROPRIATIONS AND FAMILY FARMERS
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I indicated I wanted to talk today about
the appropriations bill conference report that is going to be
considered by the Senate. The vote at this point is ordered for
tomorrow. It is a vote on the Agriculture appropriations bill
conference report.
I am a member of the subcommittee dealing with Agriculture
appropriations in the Senate. We have had a lengthy conference with the
House of Representatives and have reported out a piece of legislation.
While I am critical of the farm bill we have in this country because I
believe it does not work, I do not want to start with criticism of
anything or anybody. Rather, I want to start with compliments.
I compliment Senator Thad Cochran who is the chairman of the Senate
Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee. He does just an excellent job.
I appreciate very much the work he does.
I compliment Senator Herb Kohl who is the ranking member on that
subcommittee.
I thank Galen Fountain, our minority clerk on the subcommittee, who
does a lot of work with us, and good work; Rebecca Davies, Martha
Scott-Poindexter, Les Spivey, Hunt Shipman--staff people who have done
a great deal of work to put this legislation together.
On my staff, Dale Thorenson and Nicole Kroetsch, Brian Moran, and
Stephanie Mohl, who worked on parts of this. Thanks to all those
people.
When we bring a piece of legislation to the floor of the Senate after
it has gone through conference, it has gone through a long, tortured
process. It is not an easy thing to put together. It represents a lot
of work and compromise. Thanks to all the people I have mentioned.
I will try to, for a moment, describe why all of this is important to
me. There are a lot of things in this legislation dealing with
research, agricultural research, food research, Food for Peace--you
name it, there is a whole range of programs that deal with very
important and serious issues. But I want to focus on one thing, and
that is family farming.
I come from a State that is largely an agricultural State. The fact
is, our family farmers in this country are in deep trouble. Some people
probably couldn't care less. They get their butter from a carton, they
get their eggs from a carton, they buy their milk in a bottle, they get
their pasta in a package, and they couldn't care less what is happening
to family farmers.
Those who think a lot about it understand the importance of farmers
who are out there with their families living on the farm, with the yard
light that illuminates their place at night. They understand its
culture, and understand its contribution to our country. Those who
think about it understand the importance of broad-based economic
ownership in our country's food production.
I want to read a couple of letters because we are in a situation
where commodity prices have collapsed, the grain prices are rock
bottom, and our farmers are in desperate trouble. They are losing their
livelihood, losing their farms, having to quit. This is a letter I
received a couple of days ago from a woman named Lois. I will not read
her last name. I do not know if she has indicated she would want me to
read this on the floor of the Senate. This is a family farm in North
Dakota. Lois and her husband run a family farm. The letter says:
Dear Byron, it's 6 a.m. I woke up [this morning] and feel
compelled to write, as I feel farmers here are now at rock
bottom.
Right now as we harvest a worthless crop, pay huge
prices for our oil products, face winter and bills to pay,
we find the [crops sprout damaged and injured] by rain.
Harvest brings more stress and fears to all of us. I'm
afraid for us. I'm afraid for my neighbors and others like
us who can't make a profit thru no fault of our own. We .
. . have other jobs, but we can't keep farming. . . . I am
taking time off these days (from my work) to drive a grain
truck. I'm hauling grain that is below $1 a bushel. . . .
We need a price that is more than cost. It's called
profit. I don't have a lot of answers. We've attended many
meetings. . . . We can feed the world . . . we should feel
pride in that.
But what's wrong? There's something not connecting here.
She, like so many others, is trying to make a living on a family
farm, and they are going broke.
A farm family--a man and his wife--wrote to me about a week ago and
said:
It is with tears in my eyes that I find myself writing to
you today. After I have been assisting in what should be a
joyous time, it just couldn't be further from that. So for
the first time, I am taking steps to try and find help, for
not only ourselves, but all of those who are worse off around
us. Somebody has to help us now. . . . My husband and I
farm--near a small community in the northwest corner of North
Dakota.
We are blessed with some of the greatest soil and we felt
very fortunate until now that it has helped to provide us
with thousands of bushels of grain, plus cattle. In fact, up
until recently, we had thought we were very fortunate. We
couldn't have been more wrong, however.
We are facing the worst times our 3rd generation farm has
ever seen since its existence began in 1914. As combines are
cutting our fields, the last thing I would normally be doing
right now is writing a letter, but we have no choice.
Something has to be done and people need to know what kind of
devastation is [occurring] in our economy.
It was just this morning that we were told that our very
rare and beautifully colored, disease free durum wheat is now
only worth 80 cents a bushel. Our neighbors were not so
``lucky.'' There is no market for theirs as it was not close
to perfect.
Our banks will not collect on their loans, young people
like ourselves are going to just pack up and leave. . .
. There is just no reason for us to continually be abused.
. . .
She raises the questions, as other farmers do, about everyone else
making record profits that handle their grain. The grain elevators,
railroads, and the grain trade all make record profits.
She says:
We are one of the very few young farmers left in our
community and after this harvest there will be many more
forced to leave. There just will be no alternative.
Another letter from another family farm in North Dakota. A farmer
writes:
So why do I write? Simply to encourage you to continue the
battle, to be a voice alerting the nation to the financial,
cultural and social devastation that is taking place in rural
America. As a seventy two year old lifetime farmer, now
retired, I am a witness to farm after farm being
discontinued. The immediate community in which I live vastly
changed and changing. Good young family farmers are quitting
one after the other, some forced out financially, others
giving up before complete financial ruin. There is no profit
incentive, the gamble is too great, the fight against
weather, disease, regulations and prices too heavy a burden
to bear.
This farmer writes:
Personally, I have a son now forty five, who has farmed
since graduating from the University of North Dakota. His
hope is fading. He talks of farming one more year and [then
giving up]. He is a fourth generation farmer ready to give
up. His son now seven never to continue into the fifth
generation [on the family farm].
He says:
My concern is for my family, my community, the nation.
I will not read any more. I have so many letters from farmers. They
are out there wondering what is wrong with an economic system which
rewards everyone except those who produce the crops.
Some say: The ``family farm,'' that is kind of like the little old
diner that
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gets left behind when the interstate comes through. It was a great old
place once, but it is irrelevant now because the interstate moves
people past that diner. They say that is what the family farm is like.
They couldn't be more wrong.
I have indicated before, go to Europe, if you wonder what an economy
ought to be with respect to rural values. Europe was hungry at one
point so it decided never to be hungry again. One part of national
security is to make sure you have a network of producers, a network of
family farms producing your food. That way you will not have
concentration; you will have broad-based economic ownership, and you
will provide national security with respect to food. Europe has a
healthy agricultural base. Europe has family farmers who are making
money and small towns that have life on their main streets. Why?
Because Europe has chosen an economic model that says they intend to
keep their family farmers on the farm.
Our country ought to do the same, for a whole series of reasons, some
economic, some cultural, some social. But family farms contribute more
than just grain. They contribute families, yes; they contribute
community; they contribute a culture that is very important to this
country.
A wonderful author named Critchfield used to write about the
nurturing of family values in this country. He said family values have
always started, in the two centuries of America, on its family farms,
and rolled to its small towns and to its cities. The refreshment and
nurturing of family values has always come from the seedbed of family
values; and that is our family farms.
If one wonders what kind of cultural devastation occurs or what kind
of cultural changes will occur in this country if we lose our family
farms, our rural economy, and turn into a country in which corporations
farm all of America from coast to coast--one can see that model in a
number of other areas. It is not something that advances our country's
interests. Rather, it retards our country's interests.
So I do not come here making excuses in support of family farms. I
come saying that the support of family farms is essential for the long
term well-being of this country.
How do we support family farms? Well, we have a farm bill that is a
disaster called Freedom to Farm. We gave farmers so-called freedom to
farm, but not freedom to sell. So farmers are prevented from selling
into certain markets. The freedom to farm is a presumption that
individual family farmers have the economic clout in which to deal with
everyone else with whom they have to deal.
Does a family farmer have a chance when complaining about railroad
rates? I do not think so. Ask the folks in Montana who filed a
complaint against the railroad rates. Ask them if they got a fair shake
when it took 16 years to get the complaint processed down through the
ICC.
Who wins when the family farmer is overcharged by a railroad for
hauling grain? The railroad wins.
Who wins when the food manufacturers or the grain trade takes a
kernel of wheat, moves it somewhere down the line on the railroad and
into a plant, puffs it up, puts it on a grocery store, and calls it
puffed wheat? Who wins when they take produce from farmers and give
them a pittance for it, and then charge a fortune for it on the grocery
store shelf? It is the same kernel of wheat, only it has had a puff
added to it. The puff is worth more than the wheat. The people selling
the puffed wheat are making a fortune, and the family farmers are going
broke.
Is that an economic model that has any justice in it at all? The
answer is no. So we ought to have a farm program that works. And we do
not. Next year we ought to commit ourselves to repealing Freedom to
Farm, and rewriting a bill that works for family farmers, that provides
a safety net for family farms in the country. This is not rocket
science. They do it in Europe. We ought to be able to do it in our
country.
Let me describe, just for a moment, what we have in this
appropriations bill. We have disaster assistance in this appropriations
bill.
I want to show a couple of charts that talk about what happened in
North Dakota in the spring of this year after the crops were planted.
This chart happens to show a grain field. It does not look like it, but
it is a grain field. From the evening of June 12 until the morning of
June 14--a day and a half--a stalled thunderstorm system--actually
several thunderstorms converging together--dumped as much as 18 inches
of rain in the Red River Valley, near Grand Forks, ND.
North Dakota is a state that usually gets 15 to 17 inches of rain a
year. We are a semiarid state which averages 15 to 17 inches of
rainfall a year. From June 12 through June 14, in some of these areas,
we had 18 inches in 36 hours.
A few days later on the evening of June 19, around 7 o'clock in the
evening, flash flooding and severe thunderstorms hit the Fargo-Morehead
area about 80 miles south of the first set of storms in the Red River
Valley. By 11 p.m. that evening, more than 4 inches of rain had fallen,
and it looked as if maybe the worst had passed. But thundershower after
thundershower pummeled the area after midnight, dropping an additional
2 inches of rain in 90 minutes. So, this area ended up with a total of
6 inches of rain in a very short period. This is a totally flat
terrain. It caused massive sheet flooding. Throughout the area around
Fargo, seven to 9 inches of rain in total fell in the timespan of 6
hours.
This chart shows what a grain field looked like the day after. Here
is another picture of grain fields. As you can see, there is no grain
there. This is a lake. In fact, this area used to be Lake Agassiz long
before any of us were around. But you can see what this does if you are
a family farmer and you have been out in the spring planting grain. We
now have a flood.
The floods in North Dakota, the drought in Texas, the drought in
Georgia, the drought in Mississippi, and other parts of our country,
the disasters in Montana, all persuaded this Agriculture appropriations
subcommittee to add more funding for disaster aid. We originally added
$450 million for Crop Loss Assistance due to weather disasters when the
bill was in the Senate--an amendment I offered on the floor of the
Senate.
When it went to conference, the need was obvious, so we added more.
It went to $1.1 billion for disaster aid because we had had continued
disasters in Texas and in the Deep South. In fact, look at Georgia
here. The weekend before we lost our late colleague, Senator
Coverdell--who was a distinguished Senator and one I deeply admired--
the weekend before we tragically lost our colleague, I had spoken to
him about what was happening in Georgia. He said that he was going to
cosponsor with me a disaster piece that would provide assistance for
farmers in that area of the country. We had need--because of the
floods--in our area as well.
We have had drought in the Deep South. As shown on this chart, we can
see these red areas. We have had flooding in other areas. We have had a
pretty difficult time this year in many areas of the country.
So this piece of legislation adds $1.1 billion for disaster
assistance. This help allows farmers who have been struck by natural
disasters to be able to claim some help for crops that they were not
able to harvest.
In addition to that, we had folks up in this part of North Dakota
that harvested a crop--a crop that looked great--but they had a
disaster when they delivered that crop to the grain elevator. They took
a durum crop from the field--a 45-bushel-to-the-acre crop, which is a
pretty good crop--only to discover that when they got it to the grain
elevator it was full of disease and sprout damage. They found out that
grain they thought was going to be worth a decent price was now valued
by the grain trade at only 80 cents a bushel.
The cost of producing this grain is probably $4 to $4.50 a bushel.
So, they had a field waving in the wind, getting ripe and ready to be
harvested. They got the combine out, took the grain off, and then
discovered what cost them $4.50 a bushel to produce was now worth 80
cents. To make matters worse, they also found out that the crop
insurance they had taken out to insure their crop does not provide help
for them to cover the quality loss.
That is called a quality loss adjustment. Actually a better word for
it is a
[[Page S10610]]
catastrophe. If you have a product that you have produced, and it turns
out to be worth almost nothing, that is a catastrophe.
Here is what has happened to our farmers. You can see, going back to
1996, wheat prices were very high. That is when Congress passed Freedom
to Farm. Many of us stood on the floor of the Senate warning, at that
point, this isn't going to continue. But Freedom to Farm provided
specific payments over a period of time after which there would be a
phaseout of the program altogether. You can see what has happened to
prices. You can see with prices at rock bottom, having collapsed and
stayed down for some while, that the quality loss adjustments mean that
farmers are getting pennies for their crop.
This disaster is not a natural disaster, but rather it has resulted
in quality loss adjustments by the grain trade that had to be addressed
in this bill. For the first time, this legislation will provide $500
million for quality loss adjustments. I will talk through that for a
moment so people understand why this is in the bill and why it was
necessary.
These farmers haven't caused the problem. These are good family
farmers who have discovered that their crop, especially in our part of
the country up in North Dakota, with the worst crop disease in a
century, these are farmers who have discovered that they have produced
a rather bountiful crop that is worth nothing when they take it to the
grain elevator. Without the quality loss assistance, we would have had
a wholesale migration from our family farms. We are going to have a lot
of migration anyway by family farmers who simply can't make it. But the
disaster aid and the quality loss adjustment is going to be a step in
the right direction by at least extending a hand to say until we change
this farm bill, here is some help.
I pushed very hard on quality loss assistance. I know I might have
bruised some feelings here and there, but I just didn't think we had
any choice. We can't say to family farmers, when their prices are
collapsed, that it doesn't matter. We can't say to family farmers who
are out there struggling: When your crop is hit by disease, it doesn't
matter; when your crop insurance doesn't pay off, it doesn't matter; if
you are hit 6 or 7 years in a row by natural disaster, as has been the
case with many counties in North Dakota, it doesn't matter.
We have a responsibility to define the kind of economy we want in
this country. The kind of economy I want is an economy that values that
which is produced on our family farms. Our farm program needs changing
desperately. We have not been able to get that done this year. In the
meantime, this piece of legislation, this Agriculture appropriations
bill, does provide some fill so that with respect to disaster and
quality loss adjustments, we are able to provide some short-term,
interim help to family farmers.
I say to Senator Cochran, Senator Kohl, and others who were willing
to allow me to press as hard as I did to put this in the bill, I
appreciate--and the family farmers in my State will appreciate--the
opportunity to continue to try to make that family farm work and to
make a living.
I say, again, that we have a responsibility to decide as a Congress
whether we want family farms in our future. For those who don't, let's
just keep doing what we are doing and that is where we will end up. We
will eventually not have any family farmers left in this country. But
for those who, like me, believe that a network of family farms is
essential to this country, to its culture and its economy, then we
better wake up and work together and write a farm bill that works and
gives farmers some hope. We better do that, not 2 years from now, not 3
years from now. We better do that now.
We are about ready to adjourn, I suppose, at the end of this week or
the end of next week, and we will reconvene as a Congress, the 107th
Congress, in January. My hope is one of the first items of business is
for us to understand that rural America has not shared in this
bountiful prosperity of our country. It is not just that food has no
value. You look around the world at night on your television screen,
you will discover that there are people who are hungry, there are
children who are going to bed with an ache in their belly in every
corner of the globe. Food does have value. But the food that is
produced in this country, regrettably, has value only for established
monopolistic interests, those who have become big enough to flex their
economic muscle at the expense of those who produce the food.
Everyone who touches a bushel of grain produced by a family farmer
seems to be making record profits. Every enterprise that touches it
seems to be doing well. The railroads, the grain trade, the grocery
manufacturers, they are all doing well. In fact, they are doing so
well, they are marrying each other. Every day you read about another
merger. They want to get hitched. They have so much money, they are all
rolling in cash. It is the folks out here who took all the risks and
plowed the ground and seeded the ground and harvested the crop. They
are the ones who can't make a living. There is something disconnected
about that kind of economic circumstance.
We can have the kind of economy we choose to have. It is within our
ability to define the kind of economy we want for this country. I hope,
beginning next year, we will decide that there is a different way, a
better way to extend the help for family farmers with a farm program
that really works during tough times and a farm program that we would
not need during better economic times when grain prices reflected the
real value of the grain produced by family farms.
We have made some progress in the Agriculture appropriations bill
dealing with sanctions. It is not the best, but we have made some
progress. Many of us in the Senate, many in the Congress, have believed
that it is relatively foolish for our farmers to bear the brunt of
national security interests by having sanctions against other countries
that say you can't ship food or medicine to certain countries because
we are angry with their leaders. That has never made any sense to me.
We can be as angry as we like with the country of Iran or Libya or
Cuba or Iraq, but refusing to ship food to those countries doesn't hurt
Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro. All that does is hurt hungry, sick, and
poor children. It hurts hungry people, sick people, and poor people in
countries to which we are not allowed to ship food and medicine. Talk
about shooting yourself in the foot, our public policy has been to say
ready, aim, fire, and we shoot ourselves right smack in the foot on the
issue of sanctions.
I don't have a quarrel with those who want to strap economic
sanctions on the country of Iraq. That is fine with me. But sanctions
should not include food. We have tried mightily to get rid of the
sanctions with respect to a range of countries with whom we now prevent
the shipment of food and medicine. This legislation marginally moves in
that direction. It includes some elements of the amendment I put in the
appropriations bill as it went through the Senate. But, once again, it
is reactionary with respect to Cuba. There is going to be no grain sold
to Cuba because of restrictions put in here by a few people who were
trying to hijack this debate in the conference. The result is it
tightens up on travel restrictions to Cuba, and virtually means there
will be no food sold in Cuba. In my judgment, that is very foolish, but
we will live to fight another day on that issue. At least part of what
is done in this legislation dealing with sanctions on agricultural
shipments is a step in the right direction.
There is much more to talk about in this legislation. Let me end by
mentioning my thanks to the people who helped put this legislation
together. It is not easy to do. On balance, while there are some things
I don't agree with--I have not described what those are--I think it is
a good piece of legislation and a pretty good appropriations bill. It
ought to be a precursor for all of us who support family farmers to
understand that year after year, when you have to add a disaster piece
and emergency pieces to deal with the failure of a farm program, it is
time to rewrite the farm program from the start.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Voinovich). The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
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Mr. DASCHLE. 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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