Robert Berry: “Mr. Chairman, I want to say what a wonderful job the chairman and the ranking member of the Committee on Agriculture…”

“Mr. Chairman, I want to say what a wonderful job the chairman and the ranking member of the Committee on Agriculture have done. I appreciate very much the hard work the gentlemen have put into this. Mr. Chairman, I also want to say that I think the sponsors of this amendment mean well. The people that support this amendment have the best of intentions. When I ran for office first in 1996, it was interesting to me that all of my opponents suddenly had become farmers. If they were not farmers themselves, in some way they could contrive, they will know a farmer or their grandfather was a farmer or they would know a lot about a farmer or they had seen a farmer someplace or they had seen a crop someplace. But they all wanted to be related to farmers in some way or another. I found that interesting today that suddenly we have this great outpouring of knowledge about agriculture in this body. I would suspect, and I do not know for sure, that none of the sponsors of this amendment, and very likely none of the people that have spoken in favor of it, have ever raised a crop or produced any significant amount of food. I would submit, Mr. Chairman, that our job is to make sure that this country has a food supply, a reliable, safe, reasonably priced food supply, and in the effort to produce this, we must protect our air and water quality, and that is what this base bill does.”