David Valadao: “This has been a tough one for me because I am the only dairy farmer in this room, and it has been a tough issue because…”

“This has been a tough one for me because I am the only dairy farmer in this room, and it has been a tough issue because I've lived it for the last 15 years. I have seen how programs created by this body have hurt dairy farmers. There have been a lot of programs eliminated in this current farm bill, and that's a good thing. It takes us in a more market-oriented direction. But what I see here is we're continuing that same path in a small way. This margin insurance, by definition, is an insurance when you lose money. You lose money because you're producing a product consumers aren't buying. If government is going to continue to push money in that direction, we have to make sure that they don't continue to produce that product consumers don't want. The argument that we're going to miss out on an opportunity to export, if there's an export market and they're producing for that, they will sell that product. But you can't have a subsidized product coming into the marketplace and want to grow that export market again on a subsidized product because you can't continue to produce that product for that price. If we can't compete, we shouldn't be producing it. If it's going to require that margin insurance to make sure it's produced, it's not a long-term market. It's not a stable market. It's not something that we should spend billions of dollars investing in infrastructure that will not compete. So I think, at the end of the day, that this is probably the best program.…”