Ron Lewis: “I am from Kentucky, and I can tell my colleagues that we are talking about small tobacco farms and family farms where…”

“I am from Kentucky, and I can tell my colleagues that we are talking about small tobacco farms and family farms where men and women and their children get out in the fields every summer and try to eke out a living in the tobacco fields by the sweat of their brow. They have had to purchase a government program, they have had to buy a quota in order to grow tobacco or they could not grow it. They contributed through an assessment fee to pay for a price support program on their own. It was not from taxpayers; and since 1997 that quota program has been cut over half, and now it is pretty difficult for them to maintain that living on that family farm. It is the last thing that has allowed them to make a profit on their farm, if they made a profit. It was a program that allowed them to put their kids through college or to buy Christmas presents or to buy clothing for their kids. This is about small family farms in about seven to 10 States in this country. It is about an asset that they had to pay for that now is being taken away from them by the government; and we are eliminating something that, it is amazing to me, that for years I have heard we have got to get rid of this program, we have got to get rid of this program.”