Bill Clinton: “Yes. We actually have a program that provides low interest loans for first-time farmers, as well as a program in the…”

“Yes. We actually have a program that provides low interest loans for first-time farmers, as well as a program in the Department of Agriculture that gives kind of technical support and assistance for new farmers. And one of the things that I've asked Secretary Glickman to do is to assess the adequacy of that program and to look at some of the things that we're doing in nonfarm communities, setting up community financial institutions that make extra loans and things of that kind to see if they might be relevant to first-time farmers. As I said at the beginning of our interview here, I got the national officers of the FFA here with me. And these young farmers are the future of America. The average farmer is about 59 years old in America today, and I'm very concerned about that in places where, like in Murfreesboro where you're doing very well economically, if a farmer chooses to sell his or her land to a developer, and you subdivide it, well, there's nothing I can do about it and probably nothing you would want to do about it. You don't remove the right to do that if that's what the market is dictating. But I think where young people want to farm and are able to farm, if they can get the credit, they ought to be able to get the loans at affordable terms and at good repayment terms. One of the things that we've done for college loans since I've been here, that I think might have some applicability to first-time farmer loans I want to look at, is to structure the repayment in a way that's tied directly to income. So for example, if a young person wants to go to college and then take a job as a schoolteacher, and another would go to college and take a job as a stockbroker, and they borrow the same exact amount of money to get out of college, but the stockbroker has an income of 3 times the schoolteacher's, under the new provisions of our college loan program, the schoolteacher can pay back the money with a ceiling on it as a percentage of his or her income. So if a young person wants to go into some sort of public service--to be a police officer, a nurse, a schoolteacher, a social worker, something like that--they can do that. Well, if you think about the early years of farming and how meager the income might be, there may be something we can do to structure the same sort of loan program for first-time farmers. So we're looking at a lot of other options. But we do have--to go back to your first question--we actually do have a program in the Department for first-time farmers to provide for loans and for technical assistance to help them get started. [Secretary Glickman noted that the Agriculture Department's outreach office provided technical assistance to first-time farmers. He then introduced Bill Ray of the Agrinet Farm Radio Network in Kill Devil Hills, NC, who welcomed listeners to the Outer Banks.]”