Political Quotes

“This is going to come back to harm the average farmer in the United States. We have farm organizations that support it, and some of the big ones do not support it; but we are looking at a situation where the President has indicated to us this morning that this overpayment to the big farmers is a problem. Let me read a quote that he made last month. The President said: ``There are a lot of medium-size farmers that need help, and one of the things we are going to make sure of as we restructure the farm programs is that the money goes to the people that it is meant to help.'' I hope we consider doing this, because, number one, we encourage more production, overproduction, if we say the big farmers that already have a lower unit cost of production are getting that fixed payment, so they tend to get bigger. They tend to buy out other farms, the medium-sized farmer that is struggling to make a go of it and tries to buy out the smaller farmer. So we are perpetuating the large, corporate-type farming operations. Maybe that is what some people want to call a family farm. I do not think that is what the public policy of the United States Congress should be, supporting and expanding with the kind of farm program that does not have some real limits on farm payments.”