Byron Dorgan: “That is exactly the case. I just hope that as we finish these comments now, we will all understand that there is work to…”

“That is exactly the case. I just hope that as we finish these comments now, we will all understand that there is work to do. When you see reports like this--reports that don't surprise us because we have been hearing it for some long while--we should understand that while part of this country is doing quite well and there is a lot of good economic news, there are also troubled spots in our economy that are causing enormous hurt and pain to people who don't deserve it. America's family farmers are wonderful people. They are the people in this country who work, who grow, who risk, who come together, neighbor to neighbor, to help each other. But they can't help each other when they go to the market and discover that the price of wheat is $3 or $3.30, or when they go to the field and discover that scab wiped out half the quantity of their grain, or when they go to the railroad and discover that the price to haul the wheat to market is vastly inflated, or when they go to the border up in Canada and discover unfair shipments of grain that undercut their prices, or when they say, I would like to sell my wheat to China, or my beef to China, but you can't get wheat or meat into China in any meaningful quantity because we don't have open markets overseas. It is not fair to put farmers in that position, and we should not. It seems to me that we have a responsibility to provide a basic safety net if we want to protect a network of family farmers to be present in this country's future.”