Bill Clinton: “Well, first of all, we're going to rewrite the farm bill, as you probably know. We have to do that for 1995. And one of…”

“Well, first of all, we're going to rewrite the farm bill, as you probably know. We have to do that for 1995. And one of the things that I've asked the Secretary of Agriculture to do is to examine whether or not the bill that was done in 1990 has done enough to help family farmers stay in business and whether or not we need to look at the farm finance issue even more than the crop price supports, as well as to look at what we can do to help younger people get into farming. And that's all separate from what we need to do for the farmers that lost money in the flood, you know, in the Midwest. Just in my lifetime, and especially in my tenure as a Governor of a farm State where most of the farmers were family farmers, I watched the number drop drastically. I think that we are looking at a period, if they can hang on another year or so, where just looking into the future you're going to have pretty stable markets for American agricultural products, in fact, ones that might grow and where, if we can put in place some systems in this new farm bill to help the family farmers deal with the radical swings in income caused by the weather, caused by markets, caused by other things that the big corporate farms can endure, I think that the future of the people now farming can be pretty solid. But I do think with the average age of the farmer being about 58 and a half now, we're going to have to do something to help ease the financial barriers to getting young people into farming.”