Bill Clinton: “If you look at how you sell cattle or, especially, how increasingly hog operations are going and you compare that to how…”

“If you look at how you sell cattle or, especially, how increasingly hog operations are going and you compare that to how the tobacco co-op works as a buyer of last resort, so that the cash is transferred to the farmer immediately and someone else basically is holding the crop until it can be sold and paying the price of holding the crop--I mean, it gives you some idea of what--it would be good if we could figure out a way to do. Now, it's very different with live animals you still have to feed, you still have to--they don't warehouse too well, and you still have to feed them. So I don't--none of these issues are simple. If they were simple, we wouldn't have to worry about them. But I do think you made a good point. And I want to get back to the subject at hand, but I promise you I'll spend some time on this because it's very important to me to see that we don't lose every small farmer in America just because of the structure of the money economy, the finance economy, as opposed to the efficiency of the operation. I'm not interested in protecting any inefficient operators who can't compete, but I have seen enough crops come in now over the course of my life in enough different areas to believe that it's more the way the money economy is structured and the way the products are brought to market than the efficiency of the farmer that's changed the structure of farming. The reason you've got all these small farmers here is you've got the allocation, the limited production, and the cooperative buyer. I believe that. Mr. Sprague, do you want to go next? You're the president of the Kentucky Farm Bureau, and I understand you're a fifth generation farmer. And you have 3,000 acres of crop; that makes you a big tobacco farmer--it makes you a small rice farmer in Arkansas and a big tobacco farmer in Kentucky. [Laughter] [Bill Sprague stated that tobacco generated $1 billion worth of income for Kentucky farmers and 3 or 4 times that much as it moved through the economy. He indicated that the present situation regarding tobacco created uncertainty in the whole tobacco industry and said that the Nation needed a policy at the national level that would give stability to the industry.]”