On the recordJune 27, 2018
this week we are considering the bipartisan farm bill. The Senator from Mississippi who was just presiding, the Presiding Officer, and I were all raised on farms, so we have an immediate sense that this must be pretty important because of where we grew up and how we grew up. But I think people have less and less connection with what it really takes to grow the food and fiber we need in this country. The farm bill doesn't have quite the same resonance it used to have in terms of millions and millions and millions of families watching carefully to see what the Congress is going to do. In fact, the families who watch this most closely today may very well be the families who benefit from the nutrition parts of the farm bill. The vast majority of spending is in the nutrition parts of the farm bill. The truth is that if you don't have what people need to sustain themselves, nutrition policy really doesn't matter unless what we do in agriculture works. So a lot of the debate here is about that. In my State of Missouri, we have nearly 100,000 farms. The vast majority of those are family-owned and cover two-thirds of the total land of our State. The industry supports 400,000 jobs in a State of 6 million people, so it has a substantial impact on what we do. The Mississippi Valley, where the Presiding Officer and I are located, is the biggest piece of contiguous agricultural ground in the world, and we are in the middle of that.…
