Sam Farr: “I stand as the representative of the most productive agricultural land in the world. It is in the State of California…”

“I stand as the representative of the most productive agricultural land in the world. It is in the State of California, and it is the Central Coast Valley. We produce what this bill is talking about, specialty crops. Specialty crops are essentially those crops that we eat every day in salads, the lettuce, the artichokes, the strawberries, the grapes. We grow flowers. We grow everything that is not essentially in the commodity world, and we grow that just with market forces; that is, if there is not a good price for the crop, the farmer loses. So what this bill does is bring the specialty crop, which frankly last year made more money than the commodity crops did, and California being the leading State, and almost all of the agriculture in California is in specialty crops, it is a remarkably important bill for our State and for all the people of the country who are in farming in specialty crops. Our specialty crops have no price supports. There are no direct payments. There are no marketing loans. There are no countercyclical payments. All we are asking for in this bill is for some help with research money and market promotion.”