Collin Peterson: “I will just say very briefly that, as I said earlier, we get kind of off on tangents here on talking about small farmers…”

“I will just say very briefly that, as I said earlier, we get kind of off on tangents here on talking about small farmers and so forth. But the effect of a lot of these different proposals on reform, the effect of them are going to be to raise food prices for people in this country and around the world, and if that's what you want to do, you know, you can talk to your voters about that. But 23 percent of the farms in this country have more than $50,000 of sales. But they do 90 percent of the business. They produce 90 percent of the food and they get 81 percent of the payments. So we already have changed things. But the point is $50,000, I think my good friend from Arkansas will agree, in our part of the world is not a real farm. You can't make a living on $50,000 of gross income on a farm. It's just not realistic. So when you get up to a realistic commercial size farm, they produce just about all the food in this country. Now there's some small farms that are developing that are doing pretty well, and I've been supporting that and we're supporting that for the first time in this farm bill; and that is people producing organic, people producing local foods, getting out of the commercial system. So there is a place for small farmers in these niche markets, and they're growing, and that's a good thing. But you go to those niche markets and you're finding you're paying a lot more money for that type of food. And a lot of people want that and that's great.…”