[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 77 (Thursday, May 4, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2763-S2765]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Northeast Colorado Fires
Mr. GARDNER. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about
the recent impact of prairie fires in northeastern Colorado. A lot of
times when you turn on the national news in the spring, summer, or
fall, you might see fires in Colorado, but most of the time those fires
are located in western Colorado in the mountains.
We have had some horrible fires in recent years. The past decade has
been littered with far too many fires of great consequence to our
environment, to families, and to homes--and the damage they have
caused. Oftentimes we don't see as much in the news about fires in
other parts of the State, including the Eastern Plains of Colorado, the
Great Plains and prairies.
At the end of March, Logan and Phillips Counties saw a blaze that
burned 32,000 acres, destroying homes, harming cattle and farm
operations, and shutting down a key interstate corridor. To put 32,000
acres into perspective, in 2016, the largest fire in Colorado was the
Beaver Creek fire near
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Walden, burning tens of thousands of acres over the course of 3 months.
The fire burned about 38,000 acres. The fire burning 32,000 acres in
northeastern Colorado took only about 24 hours of time. So we had
38,000 acres burn in 3 months, and 32,000 acres in northeastern
Colorado burned in 24 hours. In both cases, these were incredibly
dangerous situations to land, people, and those around them.
These images from the Denver Post paint a frightening picture of the
devastation the area faced. We can look at these pictures here. You can
see what happened with the dirt, debris, smoke, and weather that was
created by the fire, and you can see the damage and what happened. You
can see the damage to property here.
I want to go back to the earlier picture and talk about some of the
other impacts we saw. You can see the firemen from eastern Colorado
working to protect property, trying to stop the fire before it reached
the homestead.
You can see someone with a tractor, and they are trying to disc up
the ground, trying to create a firebreak. People from around eastern
Colorado, northeastern Colorado were getting into their tractors,
getting their tillage equipment, their chisels, discs, and sweeps to
try to break up the ground to create a firebreak so that maybe they
could stop the fire. I commend the first responders for containing this
fire and preventing any loss of life while also preventing other fire
hotspots from breaking out into larger, devastating blazes because of
the work they did.
In the middle of these fires, I remember talking to a county
commissioner from Logan County, and he described the situation where
they had tried to create a firebreak with their road graders and the
farmers in the field trying to disc up the ground to stop the fire from
moving.
I remember vividly when the county commissioner told me that at a
certain time of the day he had to make a phone call that he would never
forget in his life. He called the county commissioners from the
neighboring county and said that the fire was moving that way. He said:
Hey, I want you to know, Logan County is unable to stop the fire. It is
coming your way. I am sorry; it is in your hands now.
Imagine that phone call. This horrible thing that has happened in
your county is also spreading to the next county, and you can't do
anything about it, despite the incredible efforts and acts of heroism
to try to stop it.
Fire departments from across Colorado came to northeastern Colorado
in that part of the State to stand alongside local firefighters to get
this fire under control. Dozens of agencies and departments responded.
Being from Yuma County, south of where this fire took place, I know
how alarming and unforgiving these fast-moving prairie fires can be on
the farmers, ranchers, and communities in their path. I fought prairie
fires as well in northeastern Colorado and know how fast they move and
how indiscriminate they are in their destruction.
I also know the challenges people now face in Phillips and Logan
Counties as they try to recover in the spring, but I can confidently
say that the community is recovering. According to local agronomist,
Dave Gibson:
Within six days of the fire, 85 percent of the cropland was
planted with oats to prevent soil erosion with neighbors
volunteering to help and donate. It was an amazing effort.
My office has been in communication with State and Federal officials,
along with those impacted, to ensure we are doing everything possible
to assist in this process.
Those from northeastern Colorado are dependent upon agriculture for
their way of life. Two-thirds of Colorado's agricultural production
comes from the South Platte River valley, those areas considered to be
in northeastern Colorado. I have spoken on the Senate floor about the
difficult times these farmers are facing outside of the context of
national disasters. When times are already tough, seeing your land and
cattle operation burned up in a prairie fire makes things even worse.
It is during these challenging times in agriculture, whether it is the
impact of fire or low commodity prices, that we are reminded of the
need for effective leadership.
I was pleased this last week when the Chamber came together in a
bipartisan fashion to confirm Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia as our
Secretary of Agriculture. Senators on both sides of the aisle
recognized that supporting our Nation's farmers and ranchers is not a
partisan issue.
It is my hope that we can support Secretary Perdue to expeditiously
confirm the rest of his team at USDA because we need it in agriculture.
Whether it is the FSA or a crop insurance issue as a result of a fire
or a situation relating to trade and how we are going to address low
commodity prices, the Secretary of Agriculture needs a team around him.
Congress must work with Secretary Perdue to address this crisis in
agriculture.
In Colorado, we have seen net farm incomes drop 80 percent since the
record highs of 2011. If you look at this headline, this was in the
Wall Street Journal some weeks ago. The headline says: ``The Next
American Farm Bust Is Upon Us.'' That is because if you look at just
the State of Colorado alone, there has been a drop of 80 percent in
farm income from the record highs of 2011. That is net farm income down
80 percent.
I believe this Congress needs to act with a four-pronged approach.
First, we need a long-term farm policy in place. With the farm bill
expiring in September of 2018, Congress must begin negotiating about
how we are going to move forward in a responsible fashion. I commend
the Senate and House Agriculture Committees for holding hearings on the
next farm bill, and I look forward to conducting our own roundtables
and listening sessions to talk about and to learn about and to listen
to how we can make a difference. Federal policy certainty with a long-
term farm policy is essential for farmers and ranchers.
The second thing we must do is to provide regulatory relief. We have
already repealed about $85 billion worth of regulations over the last 3
months. That is an incredible feat to relieve the American economy from
the harm and pressure of $85 billion worth of regulatory overreach. By
relieving the American business community of that $85 billion worth of
regulations and relieving the American family of that pressure as well,
it also means we have been able to reduce paperwork by 54 million
hours.
Imagine that: $85 billion worth of regulatory reductions means there
is 54 million hours of paperwork that no longer has to be completed.
Instead, that money, time, and effort can be invested in growing
opportunities and following up on sales leads and making that money
work for the business and family instead of just for the government.
When it comes to agriculture, the regulatory relief to address this
next American farm crisis--some of that regulatory relief, the $85
billion, includes measures such as repealing the Bureau of Land
Management 2.0 rule or finally getting the waters of the United States
regulation out of the way. That is the kind of regulatory relief we
have to continue to pursue.
To those who may not know what waters of the United States regulation
did, let's take an example in Colorado. Under the EPA's own study, two-
thirds of Colorado waterways are described or defined as intermittent
flow. Intermittent flow means they don't have water in them year-round.
But according to the government, they would be considered navigable
waterways. I don't know how you get anything to float down a dry river,
but apparently the EPA can. That $85 billion of regulatory relief
includes stopping the waters of the United States rule. We have to
continue to peel back the burdensome regulations on American
agriculture.
The third thing we have to address is access to finance. Finance is
critical to any farmer. There is an old joke, an old saying that if you
go out to a farmer--and they may know this already--and ask: How do you
make a small fortune in agriculture? The answer is that you start with
a large one. I think it is time we fixed that.
Wouldn't it be nice if people weren't just relying on the bank, but
they could actually produce enough money to help them into the future,
to help them thrive, prosper, grow, and bring in new generations of
family? During difficult economic times, when we are facing incredible
challenges and low commodity prices, we do need to have
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access to financing. Whether it is through the community bank or banks
on Wall Street or the Farm Credit Union or farm credit system, farmers,
ranchers, and those in agriculture need access to financing to get
through this difficult time.
That production loan, that operating loan is how they make it from
season to season, harvest to harvest, and planting to planting to make
sure they have the ability to stay on the farm. Right now we have a
system that I am worried about--a financial regulatory system in place
that perhaps a farmer walks into a bank one day, a bank they have been
doing business with for 100 years, and they have never missed a
payment, but all of a sudden, based on some Washington, DC, formulary,
they can no longer get the loan they need to keep them into the next
year, even though that bank in their hometown on Main Street knows they
will be able to make that payment.
What we have created is a system and financial regulations that are
going to make it impossible for some of these farmers to work out the
crisis that is upon them. I sent a letter 2 weeks ago to the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, requesting a review of all regulations
potentially inhibiting rural access to finance.
The fourth thing we have to get right is trade opportunity for
American agriculture. With corn and wheat prices near 10-year lows, the
most obvious solution is to open up more international markets for
agriculture to continue to look for new opportunities to export
American agricultural products overseas. The price of commodities for a
bushel of corn is about the same price today as it was back when I was
born in 1974. Opening up trade opportunities, opening new markets will
give us the value-added opportunity to help get more for that bushel of
corn.
Some of the greatest opportunities lie in Asia--50 percent of global
population, 50 percent of GDP in the near future. Those are markets we
have to open up in U.S. agriculture. Those are markets that already
have access in many cases to U.S. markets, but if we want to sell
products there, sometimes we are hit with tariffs. That is not fair. We
have to make sure we are reducing the tariffs we face when we go into
their markets because they seem to have unfettered access into ours
much of the time.
Those are all measures we can address. The four things are long-term
farm policies, regulatory relief, access to financing, trade
opportunities that work for the American farmers and ranchers.
Those recent fires in northeast Colorado, as well as fires in past
years in Colorado and across the West, are another reminder of the need
to address wildfire borrowing. Wildfire borrowing is a process where
the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service spends money that it has
budgeted for the fires. It runs out of money because it didn't budget
enough money to fight the fires, and it turns around and starts
cannibalizing other areas of spending that could actually have been
used to help reduce the next forest fire. We have to end the practice
of fire borrowing, and we have to work with Secretary Perdue as head of
the U.S. Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture to end
wildfire borrowing and to improve forest and land management to prevent
these uncontrollable fires that we have seen.
Supporting those impacted by fires, whether it is in the forest or
around the prairie, is something we should all be able to get behind.
In Logan and Phillips Counties, neighbors banded together. They worked
to recover and rebuild from the devastation shown on these images. It
has happened for generations in eastern Colorado and across this
country. When there is a crisis, when there is a tragedy, neighbors
help their neighbors. You can see it in these pictures. But we can also
help our neighbors here in Washington, DC, and across our country's
vast farmlands by doing what is right in addressing these challenges.
Just as Logan County and Phillips County banded together, we should
band together with American agriculture.
It is my hope that Congress can learn from the lessons taught in the
aftermath of these difficult situations to come together, support rural
communities, support agriculture, and make sure we support our fire
response efforts, importantly, to prevent that next catastrophic fire.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mrs. CAPITO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.