Collin Peterson: “Mr. Manzullo and I are good friends, and I allowed him to modify his amendment, but I have to very strongly oppose this…”

“Mr. Manzullo and I are good friends, and I allowed him to modify his amendment, but I have to very strongly oppose this amendment. We've added several billion dollars to the conservation baseline in this bill, and even with that, we still have big backlogs in these programs. It's going to go a long ways to correcting that, but one of the ways that we're going to make this money go further is by applying the same payment limitations to these conservation programs that we're applying to title I. And the question to me is the same. If the argument is that we have large farms that shouldn't be entitled to title I payments, then why is it all right for large folks to be entitled to title II payments? What this will do, the changes that we've made are going to make this go further. It's going, I would say, to allow smaller producers a better opportunity to have access to these limited programs. And so I guess I would just say what is good for the goose is good for the gander, that we're applying these same limitations all across the programs. I understand that some of the larger folks aren't going to like this; but, you know, this is what we need. So I hear arguments against this because somehow or another conservation is different, but with the payment limitations, the effect of that is to actually weaken the title I safety net for producers. It is just not right to have a different standard for these conservation programs.”