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Mr. YODER. I appreciate my friend from Illinois for putting together this hour for us to be able to come down and have a conversation about how we protect the American farmer.
For months and months now, we have been having a debate in the United States House and Senate about how we can put together legislation that will ensure that the men and women who bring in the crops, who tend to the livestock, who create the food source for our Nation and the world have certain policies that are predictable and that encourage farming as a way of life to continue in the United States.
So I join my colleagues here, those from down in southern Illinois to--we just heard from my colleague, Dan Benishek from Michigan, who believes passionately in agriculture and protecting farmers. We are here together today united, standing on behalf of the farmers in our country.
So I call on my colleagues to help us get a farm bill done. Farmers have been waiting a long time for Congress to work together to find a solution. We are obviously divided on a lot of things, but we ought to be united on helping protect the American farmer and our American food supply.
In Kansas, farming is not just a means to make money, and certainly, it is a significant part of the Kansas economy. Along with several other parts, farming and agriculture is a key component of the Kansas economy. But it is also a way for Kansans and Americans to put food on the table for the world. Kansas is the number one wheat producer in the country, wheat that ends up feeding hungry Kansans, hungry Americans in all 50 States, and on most continents. They put in long, hard hours to bring in millions of bushels of grain, grain that will end up on the tables of the entire Nation and the entire world.
But it is also a way of life. Now farmers at home right now--I just spoke with a farmer earlier today. Farmers are bringing in--they are harvesting their soybeans. Some are still picking corn.
For generations, people have come to States like Kansas and Illinois and California and Michigan, and they have come to build a way of life. They have taken, in the case of Kansas, a prairie--it was undeveloped--and they came out there, and they brought their families and they took risk, much risk to carve a lifestyle out of the prairie. And through that hard work, through that determination, through that sweat off their brow, they tamed the wilderness and, in the process, they helped build the greatest nation the world has ever seen. And along the way, they asked for little in return. They built a nation with great bedrock values, good schools, good communities. It was all centered around the small family farmer.
So that is one of the things we are down here to protect and to talk about is continuing that American tradition of the small family farmer. And so they have worked hard. They work long days, sunup to sundown. Sometimes farmers will work through the night, 24-hour shifts even, to bring in the crops when the time has come.
I grew up on a farm myself. I remember going out, my dad going out in the middle of the winter and bringing a round bale to our cattle and ensuring that the livestock could have feed. And that meat that they produced, we produced and farmers produce all across the country, that ends up taking care of Americans everywhere.
So now those farmers, they are counting on us. When they plant their fall crops, they need predictability and they need certainty. It is time to move past short-term bills. It is time to move past short-term promises. We need to move towards long-term policies that will create stability, that will allow farmers to plant, allow farmers to go back to doing what they do best: growing food, feeding a hungry Nation.
This fall, Kansas farmers are hard at work bringing in the autumn harvest, and they are planting the 2014 crop. They have patiently waited for Congress to act on a farm bill. Now is the time to move forward.
The farm bill provides farmers with crucial safety net programs that allow them to protect their operations from uncertainty and the sudden downturns that can occur when growing crops and raising livestock. These programs are essential in providing farmers with the certainty they need to be successful.
So as we have this larger debate about how to solve the debt crisis, I think farmers have been admirable in this debate. Farmers came forward and said, Look, you know, we receive direct payments. We know that is a burden on the Treasury. We know there are a lot of burdens on the Treasury. We hope that we can all pitch in to help solve our national debt crisis. We are going to voluntarily, we are going to give those things up.
And every other group that comes before Washington, most groups give up nothing. They want more. In fact, in Washington, when you don't get more than you got last year, it is a cut.
Farmers said, We are willing to take a cut. We are willing to take billions of dollars of cuts because we want to do our part to ensure that we are helping resolve the national debt crisis.
So they were first in line to give up support, and some of that support was very crucial to farms and has been crucial to farmers to keep them from ending up in bankruptcy or farms from going under. They are giving that up. No more direct payments. Those are the kinds of reforms we need to do.
Now, what they have asked for in return is a little protection of risk. The expense today to put out a field of crops like corn, soybeans, milo, or wheat, in Kansas, creates a tremendous amount of risk--risk that banks won't cover unless there is some sort of protection in the event of a flood, hailstorm, or a drought, and sometimes all of the above. You can wipe out a single crop overnight.
These farmers have invested their entire livelihood. They don't have a 401(k). They don't have a pension. They don't have some corporate plan to protect their retirement. Their future is in the crop they're laying out in that field, and the proceeds from that crop are going to go to investing in the next crop. And so if that crop goes under and there is no crop insurance, there is no protection for those farmers, then those farmers go under, they go bankrupt, and that way of life ends.
And so my heart goes out to those farmers that that may happen to, but it is a larger issue than just the farmers. Without crop insurance, without that protection, those farmers lose those farms and that means we don't have a food supply that we can count on. That means that the world doesn't have the food that they need to feed the hungry. I know most people get food from the grocery store these days, but it comes from the fields of Kansas and Illinois and places in between.
So it is my hope that Democrats, Republicans, House, Senate, and the President will work together in the coming days to put a farm bill on the floor that we can all get behind that can go to the President's desk and receive his signature. We've got a lot of divisions, but we would be united today--all of us--in protection, in fighting for the American farmer.
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