Political Quotes

“I will end with this. There is a vegetable farmer in Brighton, CO, whom I have known for many, many years. His name is Robert Sakata. His dad started Sakata Farms in 1944 after he was released from a Japanese-American internment camp, where he was interned during World War II. For almost 80 years, Sakata Farms has been a critical ingredient of our Colorado economy--a staple of Colorado, to put it in food terms, but when Robert visited my office in the last couple of years, he handed me fliers advertising his equipment for sale. I said: Robert, why are you selling your implements? Why are you doing that? He loves what he does. He is so passionate about what he does. He is so passionate about the people who work side by side with him to produce incredible fruits and vegetables in Colorado. But he told me that he was selling because he didn't have enough labor to harvest his vegetable crop. Today, they no longer grow vegetables at Sakata Farms; they only grow row crops. Is that the future we want for American agriculture? It is not what we want in Colorado. I have heard stories like that, like Robert Sakata's story, all over my State and all over this country for the last decade. We don't have to accept the loss of the next 10 percent of America's family farms. We don't have to accept hundreds of thousands of people living in the shadows when they work every single day.…”