Angie Craig: “for now nearly 10 months, the U.S. Senate and the Senate Agriculture Committee have been working diligently to craft a…”

“for now nearly 10 months, the U.S. Senate and the Senate Agriculture Committee have been working diligently to craft a new farm bill for our country. We all know that on September 30 of this immediate past year, the old farm bill expired. We also recognize that under the necessary budget changes and spending procedures and priorities that we were establishing, a large portion of the farm bill appeared and was a part of the Balanced Budget Act that we sent to the President, and the President vetoed it. That has placed American agriculture, in my opinion, in a very precarious situation. While they have worked with us through the year of 1995 in numerous hearings that the Senate Agriculture Committee, on which I serve, participated in, we began to hear a very clear message from American agriculture that current policy was not serving it as well as it should, that there was a great desire on the part of production agriculture to progressively move to the market and produce to market trends and market ideas instead of to the perpetuation of farm programs.”