Tom Harkin: “Rural America is waiting for this bill. I urge my colleagues to send this critical legislation to the White House…”

“Rural America is waiting for this bill. I urge my colleagues to send this critical legislation to the White House without further delay. Again, I am proud that we have got this bill through. When we look back to 1996, that farm bill was signed into law about 6 months after the previous farm bill expired. I am proud to say we have this farm bill before us 5 months before the present farm bill expires. I would like to go through, as briefly as I can, the various titles of the farm bill. First, I will go through the commodity programs. Then we will take up the different areas of energy and conservation, and some other aspects dealing with trade and WTO just to set the record on where we are with this conference report before us. The conference put together a balanced package that includes three elements of support: direct payments, countercyclical payments, and marketing assistance loans. The first chart I have in the Chamber shows the protection levels for different commodities: corn, soybeans, wheat, sorghum, and barley. This is not all of the commodities; this is just representative of many of the commodities we cover. The income protection levels are shown in green on the chart for the present 1996 farm bill, plus the emergency payments are in kind of a purple color. What it shows is that for all these major crops, the farm bill before us will provide much higher income protection levels than the existing farm bill.”