Byron Dorgan: “I know the Senator is in the middle of a presentation, but the description of the underlying amendment sounds very much…”

“I know the Senator is in the middle of a presentation, but the description of the underlying amendment sounds very much like the current law, Freedom to Farm, which had at its roots the notion that farmers should essentially accept whatever the marketplace offers and we do not need a farm program, so they set up 7 years of declining payments, after which there is no farm program. The presumption was that this would "transition"--that was the operative word in Freedom to Farm--farmers out of a farm program. The experience of the past 6 years is it has been a miserable failure. It does not work. It sounds like the proposition here is to do less of the same. The old "more of the same"--this is less of the same, and the same didn't work. I ask the Senator from Iowa if he believes as I do that I do not give a hoot in terms of the commodity portion. I don't give a hoot about a bushel of grain. I care about a family who is trying to raise that grain or produce that grain on a farm.”