[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18978-18979]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                       FAMILY FARMING IN AMERICA

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this afternoon at 3 o'clock we will begin 
debate on a farm disaster relief plan that will be offered by Senator 
Harkin, myself, Senators Conrad, Daschle, and others. I think this will 
be, for those of us from farm country, one of the most important pieces 
of legislation addressed by this Congress this year. I know that unless 
one lives on a family farm, it is probably pretty hard to describe the 
farm crisis, but I thought I would read a couple letters from my 
constituents in North Dakota.
  Before I do, I am reminded of the story the former chairman of the 
House Agriculture Committee used to tell. Kika de la Garza was his 
name. He used to talk about agriculture and food by telling a story 
about nuclear submarines. He said he met with all these folks from the 
Defense Department and they told him about the wonders of these nuclear 
submarines the United States had. They told him about all of their 
provisions and all their fuel and their capabilities and their speed 
and their distance. And he said, well, how long can a nuclear submarine 
stay under the sea? And the admiral says: Until the food runs out. It 
was Kika de la Garza's way of pointing out that food, after all, is the 
essence of most of our existence, and we are a world, a rather fragile, 
large globe--as seen by the astronauts who leave our Earth and go into 
space--of diverse interests, diverse people.
  However, one thing that seems constant in this world is that we read 
that so many people go to bed hungry--especially children, but so many 
people across the world go to bed hungry. Somewhere around half a 
billion people go to bed with a serious ache in their belly because 
they do not have anything to eat. Malnutrition and lack of good 
nutrition among billions of others exists around the world.
  Then we go to the farm belt in the United States where a family is 
struggling to make a living on the family farm and find that its farmer 
loaded some grain on the truck and took it to the elevator and the 
grain trade said to the farmer: Your food does not have any value. Our 
grain trade assesses the value of your food as relatively meaningless. 
The farmer wonders about that because we live in such a hungry world. 
How could it be that what we produce in such abundance has no value?
  That is what our farmers wonder. Let me talk just about these farmers 
in the context of their words. This is a letter from a woman in the 
central part of our State whose family farms; she farms. Here is the 
kind of plaintive cry that exists from a proud and hard-working people 
in our country, family farmers who take enormous risks, risk everything 
they have to try to make a living with seeds they plant in the ground. 
They do not know whether they will grow; they do not know whether the 
natural disasters will occur--insects and hail and rain too much, too 
little. They don't know what will happen with this money they have 
invested in the soil. If they finally get their crop and they escape 
all of those problems, they get the crop off the ground and take it to 
the elevator, they don't know whether there will be a price that allows 
them to get a return for that crop.
  Those are the kinds of people who live on our family farms. They are 
the people who create the backbone of our society in our country. They 
are the people who together build a small community where they trade 
and do business. They build our churches in those communities. They 
create charities. They do the things together in a community that we 
forget about sometimes in our country. What is it that makes this 
country work at its roots? It is entrepreneurship, it is family 
farming, it is a sense of community, and it is a sense of sharing.
  Here is a family farm. This woman says in her letter to me:

       We aren't asking for a free ride, just the possibility of 
     surviving. We are private people and we bear our pain alone, 
     and we don't

[[Page 18979]]

     discuss the true situation out here on the family farm with 
     anybody. Our neighbors are all in the same shape. The spirit 
     of North Dakota will be gone with these people and their 
     farms. We cannot survive without a reasonable income. How 
     much longer will it be before people understand that we are 
     trying to feed our family, and pay for basic necessities? But 
     with today's income we are not saving money for retirement. 
     We are not going on trips. We are not enjoying any of the 
     fruits from our labor. We are slowly but surely going broke.

  A man who lives in southeastern North Dakota on the family farm says:

       It sometimes brings a tear to my eye that maybe in a year, 
     maybe two years, I will not be around in family farming to 
     matter anymore. This won't be easy to explain to my three 
     young daughters. This is where I wanted to bring them up, in 
     a rural setting of life that I was used to and that I 
     understand. If it happens, I hope they read in their history 
     books that it wasn't because their dad was a dumb man. It was 
     because it was caused by policy and giant concentration of 
     companies who want dominance.

  Or, from a woman named Susan, whose letter I have read previously on 
this floor. She lost her husband, and she had to sell their family 
farm. Prices had collapsed.

       I had an auction last week to sell the machinery so that I 
     could help pay off some of the debts that incurred after 26 
     years of farming. I have a 17-year-old son who would not help 
     me prepare for auction and did not even get out of bed the 
     day of the auction sale because he is so heartbroken that he 
     cannot continue to farm this land.

  This is a 17-year-old boy who is not a bad boy. It is just that he 
couldn't get out of bed to watch the auction sale of his farm because 
he couldn't bear to see the loss of his dream and his families' dream. 
He wanted to be a farmer as well.
  She said:

       My husband was an excellent manager, fully educated. He 
     chose to farm rather than live in a big city. He had a job 
     once with Motorola. He wanted to raise his children in a 
     place with clean air, no crime, and good schools. He worked 
     very hard physically and emotionally to make this farm work. 
     And its failure was no fault of his. Something is seriously 
     wrong with our country when we will sacrifice the family farm 
     for a political system and an entire way of life for hundreds 
     of years.

  Her point is that farmers at this point are not at fault for what is 
happening. The world is hungry. Most people need food. We raise it in 
great abundance, and family farmers are told that what they produce 
doesn't matter.
  I would like to use a couple of charts that show the dilemma that 
family farmers are facing not only in my State but around the country.
  I show this chart because some people might wonder, well, what is all 
this farm crisis about? I ask anyone who looks at this chart--this 
chart shows prices received by farmers for wheat. Most of the farmers 
in my part of the world are wheat farmers. Put minimum wage in this 
chart, if this had happened with the minimum wage; put corporate 
profits on this chart, if this had happened to corporate profits--what 
do you think the outcry would be? Put congressional salaries on this 
chart. If this had happened to congressional salaries, what would the 
outcry be?
  This represents the income farmers are receiving from their products 
when the price of every other thing is increasing. The income received 
by farmers is collapsing.
  For purposes of comparison, let me compare the price of corn and 
wheat with what farmers received for those commodities during the 
middle of the Great Depression. With the price adjusted over time, ask 
yourself: What do farmers get now relative to what they got during the 
Great Depression?
  Take a look at it in 1998. These are the worst farm prices price 
adjusted for 50 years. Families cannot make a living in this country in 
these circumstances.
  I am tempted to go into a long discussion of so-called Freedom to 
Farm. I didn't vote for it. It was a terrible piece of farm 
legislation. Some loved it. Some voted for it. Some still support it. 
Certainly it has a wonderful name.
  It reminds me of the people early on who sold insurance. They called 
it ``death insurance.'' Many years ago they sold ``death insurance.'' 
Do you know something? Death insurance didn't have a very good name for 
it. It didn't sell very well. Nobody wanted to buy death insurance. So 
what did they do? They changed the name to ``life insurance.'' It is a 
better sounding name, and it sold much better.
  So we had a farm bill called Freedom to Farm. What a nice sounding 
name with bankrupt policies that said family farming doesn't matter 
much in whatever the market system says with respect to agriculture.
  There has never been a free market in agriculture, and never will be.
  Do you think the European countries whose citizens have gone hungry 
will decide it doesn't matter whether they have family farmers? They 
will never make that decision. They will always have a farm program 
that insists on price supports for families on the farms in Europe.
  The point is that this country has decided by itself that family 
farming as a concept doesn't matter to its future; that whatever the 
market decides is what our future shall be. If the market decides that 
corporate farms shall farm from California to Maine, so be it.
  The problem with that is that all across this country we will have 
yardlights turned off and families leaving the farm. The economic 
arteries that they provide to the small towns will be closed and dried 
up, and those small towns will be boarded up. The people will be 
leaving small towns. We will see the collapse, the total collapse, of a 
rural lifestyle.
  The author Critchfield, who was a wonderful, world-wide, world-renown 
author, who actually grew up in Fargo, ND, said that family values have 
always been nurtured on the family farms in this country, and the 
refreshing small towns rolled to the cities from many family farms. It 
was always a seedbed of family values of nurturing and helping and 
working together. We will lose all of that because some people say it 
doesn't matter.
  We are having a debate this afternoon at 3 o'clock. It is critically 
important. This matters more than most people in this country will ever 
know. I hope that with my colleagues we can easily pass a disaster bill 
in the first step, and in the second that we can then pass a revision 
of the underlying farm bill, and say to farmers: You have a future. We 
want to provide you hope and help because we think you matter to our 
country.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mrs. LINCOLN. Mr. President, I echo the words of my colleague.
  I was raised on and continue to be a part of the seventh generation 
Arkansas family farm.
  I think it is so important that we recognize this is an issue--those 
from other States, as well as farm States, agricultural-based States--
and that we can impress upon our colleagues in Washington, D.C. the 
crisis that our small rural communities and our farming communities are 
going through.
  I will certainly be joining the Senator later on this afternoon in 
that debate. We need to impress upon people that this is an issue for 
this country. It is not just agriculture; it is a heritage of this 
country and a heritage of our rural communities.

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