Agriculture, Rurual Development, Food and Drug Administration, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2007
AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2007 -- (Senate - December 05, 2006)
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Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, first of all, my colleague Senator Conrad has described this amendment very well. I appreciate his leadership, as do other Members of the Senate.
For those of us who care about the future of family farming, this is a very important issue for us. I am pleased to be here today to be a cosponsor of this amendment to provide disaster aid to farmers.
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in the 1930s in one of their songs had a refrain that I have often used on the floor of the Senate: The little bee sucks the blossoms and the big bee gets the honey; the little guy picks the cotton and the big guy gets the money.
It hasn't changed much over 70 or 80 years. Somehow the big interests always have their day in the Congress. It wasn't too many months ago that they had their day. There was a little provision tucked in a bill that passed the Congress that said to the largest corporations in America: When you repatriate the income you have earned from abroad, we will give you a big deal. You get to pay an income tax rate of 5 1/4 percent. I think that was worth about a $100 billion tax cut to the biggest economic interests in this country.
It was done without a lot of debate. There is plenty of money to give a $100 billion tax cut to the big interests, but now it is time to talk about working families, family farmers, small producers.
The big interests get their day. Now we are talking about the people who shower after work rather than before work. We are talking about the people who go out and work all day. They grease combines. They plow the fields. They milk cows. They do chores. Then, at the end of the day, they take a shower and clean up because they worked hard all day. They and their families live under a yard light hoping they are going to be able to make a living. Often they plant a seed and hope it grows. They wonder whether they are going to have disease that will destroy their crop. Perhaps hail will destroy their crop. Maybe it will rain too much, or maybe it won't rain at all. Maybe if they get a crop, avoiding all those diseases and natural disasters, including weather disasters, maybe if they get a crop and they haul it to the elevator, it is worthless because that price has collapsed.
Yet that family living on the farm takes all of those risks by itself, and sometimes it doesn't work out for them.
This country for decades--for decades--has always said to family farmers who live out there alone in the country: When things happen that are tough for you--natural disasters, collapse in prices--we want to help you; we want to offer you a helping hand. We have always said that in the form of disaster aid.
It used to be that the disaster aid came in the regular farm bill because we had a disaster title in that bill. That has been changed. So now each year we have to come and plead for disaster help when a disaster occurs that hurts families living out on the farms in this country.
What has happened this year? Here is a satellite description of what happened in our country. This is July, I believe, of this year. The red in this satellite photo shows the drought. The red shows the destroyed forage. One can see the epicenter of this drought is right up in here, but the drought occurs in a wide area of this country. Look at the epicenter of this drought.
Let me read something that comes from a rancher right up here, right in the epicenter of the drought. He says in a letter dated July 12:
The grass is so dry that it breaks off when the cows walk on it. The cricks and dams, they're all dried up. We're going to have to sell some of the cows pretty soon so we can try to save the rest of them. If you can do anything to help us out, we would really appreciate it.
``If you can do anything to help us out, we would really appreciate it.'' Did anybody get an appreciative note from those who were saved $103 billion by getting a 5 1/4 -percent income tax break? Did anybody get a note of thanks? Did anybody else get to pay a 5 1/4 income tax rate? Nobody in America gets to do that. But the biggest economic interests got to do that last year because this Congress was generous: Let me give you a big tax cut of $103 billion. Now we are talking about a few billion dollars that would reach out and help families--yes, the small producers--reach out and help families over troubled times. That is what this is about.
Let me describe a little of the history of this situation. Three times the Senate Appropriations Committee on which I serve has approved amendments to provide disaster assistance. Three times I have offered those amendments, and three times they have been accepted. Last December, 1 year ago, during the conference committee on the fiscal year 2006 Defense appropriations bill, I offered a disaster amendment. The Senate conferees--both sides, Republicans and Democrats--agreed to it and accepted it. The House conferees, at the request of President Bush, objected to it because President Bush said he would veto the bill if it was part of the bill.
In June of this year again, the full Senate approved an amendment that was on the Katrina-Iraq supplemental bill, which I included in the Appropriations Committee. Let me mention that in both cases, my colleague Senator Conrad played quite a significant role in helping to draft the amendment. He serves on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and I serve on the Appropriations Committee. We used the Appropriations Committee as the mechanism by which we have tried to get this done.
Three times the Appropriations Committee in the Senate has passed amendments that I have offered to provide disaster relief. The first two occasions were occasions in which the White House objected. The President actually said, and his advisers said, they would recommend that he veto legislation that would provide disaster help for family farmers.
In June of this year, I attached the other disaster package. It is the one Senator Conrad and a large group of us--Republicans and Democrats--put together. That is what is on the floor of the Senate right now, to be amended by the new disaster package my colleague Senator Conrad offers this afternoon, which I fully support.
So this is not a new subject. No one should come to the floor of the Senate surprised. We have dealt with this subject before. The Senate has approved it before by a fairly significant margin. We have been blocked in two conferences with the House of Representatives because the White House decided to block that help.
Let me describe a couple of pieces of history about drought. It is not a new thing to have a weather disaster wipe out family farmers across this country. One can see the epicenter up in the northern Great Plains, but one can see the destroyed forage in a wide band in the heartland of our country.
Some while ago, we saw the tracking and the description and the physical damage of Hurricane Katrina. It occurred right down here in the gulf. It hit this land with devastating force, unbelievable force, and it destroyed a lot of things. Our hearts were broken as we watched what happened in the gulf.
Part of what the hurricane destroyed was the crops that family farmers had down in these fields. They got washed away and destroyed completely. The Congress passed legislation that said to those farmers: You lost your crops due to a weather-related disaster, and here is some disaster aid. The Congress said to these farmers: You lost your crops due to weather, we are going to help you.
These farmers have lost their crops due to weather. They are just in a different part of the country. No, it is not a hurricane, it is a drought. This had a name; this didn't. Is there a difference? These farmers write to us and ask: What is the difference? We had a weather-related disaster that wiped out everything we had--all the feed, all the crops. We had to sell our cows because if you have a cow and you have no feed, that cow is going to market. We lost everything, they say.
How is it you help farmers in one part of the country who suffered an entire loss of their crops due to a hurricane and then turn a blind eye to farmers in other parts of the country who lost their crops due to drought and other weather-related disasters? How do you justify that, Congress?
The answer is there is no justification for that. When we decide we are going to help--and we should, and I have always supported that, during tough times we are going to help family farmers--then we must reach out to all the farmers in this country who suffer these devastating losses.
I am not interested in sending financial help to farmers who didn't have these losses. They are just fine. That is not what we are here about today. Today we are about the issue of trying to reach out a helping hand to those farmers who suffered a weather-related disaster and suffered losses.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt went out in the country during disasters, and he actually had a tough time traveling. He traveled by train. He showed up in my part of the country on a drought tour. Then he showed up in Huron, SD, on a drought tour. Let me read what the President said. The reason I say this is we asked the President to come out and do a drought tour this past year, or one of his underlings to come out and do a drought tour. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did a drought tour. He stopped in Huron, SD, and here is what he said:
No city in agriculture country can exist unless the farms are prosperous. We have to cooperate with one another rather than buck one another. I have come out here to find you with your chins up looking toward the future with courage and hope, and I'm grateful to you for the attitudes you are taking.
He was on a drought tour speaking from a platform on the back of a train.
He was also in Devils Lake, ND, August 7, 1934. Let me tell my colleagues what he said about a drought tour, this President who took a train around the country. He said:
I cannot honestly say my heart is happy today because I have seen with my own eyes some of the things I have been hearing and reading about a year or more.
A growing drought that was eating the crops and destroying the crops. He said:
But when you come to the water problems up here, you are up against two things. In the first place, you're up against the forces of nature. The second, you're up against the fact that man, in its present stage of development, cannot definitely control those forces.
The fact is, the President went on a drought tour and said: We want to help family farmers. It is not much different than what we say today. This is important.
Let me show a photograph of a North Dakota family farmer. He allowed me to show this photograph on the floor of the Senate. This is a picture of one of the ranchers, these ranchers who, in many cases, had to sell their entire herds or parts of their herds because they had nothing to feed their cows. As I said before, if you have cows and you don't have feed, those cows are going to go to market and be sold. That is what has happened.
This is Frank Barnick. Frank and his wife and son raise cattle in Glen Ullin, ND. In this picture, he is walking in a crick bed that normally would provide water for his cattle. As one can see, it looks more like the surface of the Moon. There is no grass there, no water there. Frank says:
It's the worst drought I've ever seen. You do a lot of praying wondering how you're going to get through it.
One of the issues about getting through these tough times is the issue of what is Congress prepared to do. What is the better instinct of those who serve here? I have served in Congress for some long while, and I have always been proud of being willing to vote for emergency legislation to help people in need. It doesn't matter where it is for me. If it is a hurricane that hits the South in the gulf coast, a hurricane that hits Florida, I want to be there with my vote to say this country wants to say to you, victims of hurricanes, weather-related disasters: You are not alone.
You are not alone because this country cares about you. I have always been proud to cast those votes. I never had a second thought about them, and I never wondered very much whether we should. It is part of the better nature of this country to reach out to people and say: You are not alone and we want to help you.
I think of all of the things that we have done in this Congress in the last couple of years to help people. We go all around the world. It is an enormously generous country. We do a lot of things to help with everything virtually everywhere, and that is very important and I am supportive of that. But I think it is very important as well that we help people here at home and that we say to people here at home with respect to problems here at home that they are important to us, that what is happening in America is important to us as well.
Last year, we had people in the northern part of our State who woke up one morning to find that they had a million acres, a million acres of their ground--these are family farmers who had planted in grains--washed away and gone and could not be replanted. We had another million acres that could never be planted. We are talking about 2 million acres of ground because of torrential rains that were destroyed with respect to their productivity to raise a crop, and those family farmers sitting out there with that 2 million acres were left to wonder: What next? Will I be able to continue to farm? Will I and my spouse and my son and daughter be able to continue to own this farm?
Well, we have had torrential rains and flooding that devastated a region of our State, and then we have the epicenter of the drought, as I have just shown, that is almost unbelievable.
My colleague, Senator Conrad, and I and a Congressman took several drought tours, and I have never seen anything like it. When you lose your crop or you lose your pasture and you have no capability to feed cattle or to plant a seed or harvest a crop, is it exactly the same circumstance which that family faces as the circumstance faced by a family farmer in the gulf region in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana? Of course it is. It is exactly the same.
So my colleague today brings a piece of legislation to the floor that we have worked on and tried to perfect that does, as best we can, say to family farmers: Here is a package of disaster relief. No, it is not going to make anybody whole. This is not a massive package that everybody is going to be happy with, but at least it says to those farmers: We want you to have a chance to continue farming.
On a couple of occasions I have described the value of this, the cultural value of even caring about farming. Some people say: So what. Let the market system work. If a family is too small to make it and it floods and they can't get a crop and they are broke, tough luck. So long. See you in town someplace. Somebody else will farm that land.
We, over some 5, 8, 10 decades in this country have known better than to take that attitude. Rodney Nelson, a writer from my State and a rancher from out near Almont, ND, wrote a wonderful piece about farming. And he asked a question which is important for people in this Chamber to ask. He asked the question: What is it worth? What is it worth, he asks. What is it worth for a kid to know how to weld a seam? What is it worth for a kid to know how to plow a field? What is it worth for a kid to know how to hang a door? What is it worth for a kid to know how to grease a combine? What is it worth for a kid to know how to change the oil in a tractor? What is it worth for a kid to know how to teach a calf to suck milk out of a pail? What is it worth for a kid to know how to brand? What is all that worth? What is all that worth?
There is only one place in America where they teach all that. Read the history of the Second World War and see all those young men that marked off America's farms that could fix anything, drive anything, do anything all around the world. There is only one place they teach that, and that university exists on America's family farms. So what is that worth to this country? Does it matter that families live under the yard lights out in the country on our farms? Does it matter? It does to me. It does to me.
No, they are not big interests. I understand that. They are small producers. But they deserve a voice in this Chamber. They deserve their day. They deserve the debate about their value and their worth to this country. I guarantee you the big interests get their day virtually every day in these Chambers.
This is a day to talk about what it is worth. What is it worth for this country to say to family farmers: You matter and you are not alone when trouble strikes. What is that worth for this country?
That is why we offer this amendment today. It is important. In March and April as we prepare for a new year in the Congress and work on appropriations bills and so on, there will be farmers who will learn whether they are able to plant another crop or whether they are going to be kicked off the land. They and their families will learn: Does their dream continue or is it over? And it will depend in large part on what this Congress does on this issue. We should not consider this some sort of idle exercise.
It is true that amending this Agriculture appropriations bill is not going to apparently produce this product by the end of this week. But this Agriculture appropriations bill, one way or another, is going to end up in some kind of an omnibus bill in February or early March. I am an appropriator. I am on the committee. And we are going to do some kind of an Omnibus appropriations bill, and I will do everything I can to see that this kind of disaster package is included in it. Putting it in this Agriculture appropriations bill today is the first step in trying to insist that this, too, be a priority for our country.
Let me say to my colleague, Senator Conrad, I appreciate working with him on this and many others, and underscore the point that he has made repeatedly: This is not partisan, it is bipartisan. We have aggressive, strong Republican supporters and Democratic supporters to this provision. It is important to understand that. This is about our priorities. It is always about priorities, what is important and what is not important. And so I congratulate and thank the chairman of the subcommittee and the ranking member, Senator Bennett, Senator Kohl, and thank all of those who have joined in a very substantial bipartisan amendment to once again say to this country and this Chamber that family farmers matter to this country. And when they are in trouble, we need to reach out to say to them: You are not alone. The best, most effective way to do that today is to pass this amendment, and I hope we will do that by the end of this day.
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