Farmers, Ranchers, Foresters, and Consumers Deserve Certainty

Floor Speech

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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I greatly appreciate the work of Chairman Thompson on this Committee and the hard work on the farm bill and the demeanor with which he brings to it. He brings people together with his effort on this, by having all of us coming together to have these field hearings and listening sessions around the country since the beginning of last year in this session. I think that has been very productive and points out a strong bipartisan effort to make this farm bill come together and be successful this year. We need it to do so because we need that certainty for all the industries.

I am pleased to be able to be the chairman of the Subcommittee on Forestry. I thank Chairman Thompson on that. That is a very important issue in northern California, where my district is, but all over the West, and indeed for the whole country.

We should be deeply concerned about the state of our Nation's timber industry, the industry itself, as well as the condition of our forests. We have many mills closing down lately because they can't economically make it. It is not due to their business practices per se but more so the practices of the Forest Service and the available lands and timber harvest they need. This demands our immediate attention in the farm bill.

Many people don't know that the USDA oversees the U.S. Forest Service. That is why this element is in the farm bill.

As I am depicting in these posters here, you see the difference between managed forests and unmanaged forests, what they look like. On the left is a forest that has been thinned and properly maintained. On the right is a green forest, but it is so dense birds can't fly through it and deer can't run through it.

This used to actually be the norm--but over 50-plus years of neglect of our forested areas have allowed this to happen--because at the same time we put out fires, which is a good thing, except for when fire can be a useful tool at the right time of year under the right conditions for forest thinning.

We need active management on that. The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres in its purview, and at best it is treating 1 percent of those acres per year.

That is why it is extremely important we have private industry as a partner--indeed, the quarterback carrying the ball on this issue for this industry.

We recently we had a field hearing in South Dakota with my colleague, Dusty Johnson. We met up with Neiman Enterprises, the Neiman family, a family company who have been there for many years. They have just announced layoffs now because they can't get the number of board feet needed to sustain their business there.

It is not just about business. It is about getting the wood products and paper products and being a partner in helping our forest to be safer, cleaner, and healthier, the whole works.

If they are having to lay off people, then that means the small town of Spearfish in South Dakota is going to suffer badly economically. It means their forest is going to suffer due to overcrowding ultimately, like you see on the right here, Mr. Speaker, and make an extreme fire danger. It is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.

We need to have stronger activity. We need the Forest Service to get cracking on this.

Part of the elements we have had in recent farm bills and in this coming farm bill is a continued expansion of categorical exclusions and utilizing them. These exclusions allow the bypassing of a lot of red tape in permitting and such. It doesn't mean they are going to do things environmentally unsoundly. It just means we don't need to take 2 years to study every time we want to do a timber harvest. We already know what to do.

They require NEPA so many times. We need to have a faster process to get this done. We are falling further and further behind. We are losing the industry, and we are losing the forests.

We need to have more categorical exclusions. We need to have more pilot projects like we had in the South Tahoe area. It was a 10,000- acre one.

What happened there is that work was done in thinning that area. Fire hit that area, and it knocked the fire down and made it so it was not a devastating fire in that 10,000 acres. They were actually able to put it out.

We have the ability to expand the good neighbor policy, which enabled local governments and Tribes to help manage the land for the Forest Service since they are so far behind on this issue. We have an expansion of that in the bill, as well.

What we are doing in the farm bill is just commonsense things to make our forest practices keep our forests healthy and have an industry at the same time.

Yes, it is good to talk about having an industry. This isn't just Big Timber. This is something that we need. All these small towns in my area in northern California and all over the West have been boarded up, so to speak, from losing the industry.

We need folks to be able to come back and do this work to help us because, just recently, the U.S. has gone from the number two importer to the number one importer of wood products because China is reeling things back in.

What are we doing here? We have so much burning up in our backyard and going to waste. We need to put people to work in our country in our forests to make them better and safer and have an industry and jobs in this country.

It is so important that we have these elements in this farm bill and that we get it passed, along with all the other good things for agriculture and farming, to have a stable food supply.

The gentleman mentioned I was a rice grower myself in northern California--five generations now. We need all of the above on that in order to have a stable food supply so our country is strong and secure.

The same goes with our forestry because you see success on the left here, Mr. Speaker, and impending disaster on the right here in this poster.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman so much for allowing me to speak tonight.

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