Collin Peterson: “Mr. Speaker, it's been a long road to get to this point, and I want to start off by thanking Mr. Goodlatte, the ranking…”

“Mr. Speaker, it's been a long road to get to this point, and I want to start off by thanking Mr. Goodlatte, the ranking member of the committee, again for his great work; my subcommittee chairmen, who started this process off; the ranking members on the Republican side; my friends on the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel especially, Mr. Pomeroy, for their hard work to get to this point; the Speaker for backing us up and helping us keep on track here to get to a final consideration; and for all of my colleagues in the House for being patient and working with us and giving us your input. We have come to a point where I believe we have a good bill that should be supported by all Members of this Congress from both urban, suburban and rural areas. I have here a chart that shows how the current farm bill spending is going to be allocated on a 10-year basis, which is what we have to go by. Nutrition in this new Food, Conservation, and Energy Act is 74 percent of the spending over the next 10 years in this food bill, commodities are 16 percent. Back in 2002, these numbers were 65 and 35 or something. Conservation is 7 percent; and energy and the specialty crops, the other items, are 3 percent. This shows on another chart how we got to those numbers. We had a $58 billion reduction in our baseline.”