Earl Pomeroy: “Well, I can only speak for the comments the gentleman quoted from my own debate. And what I was so happy about the 2002…”

“Well, I can only speak for the comments the gentleman quoted from my own debate. And what I was so happy about the 2002 bill is we were restoring a safety net for farmers when prices collapsed. During the earlier farm bill, known as Freedom to Farm, that protection had been taken away and we had to resort to ad hoc disaster bills when the prices collapsed. We took care of that in the last firm bill and we have not had a disaster bill on that since. This disaster bill relates to production loss. And we're always going to have disasters in our country that bedevil some of our farmers relative to disaster dimension losses. We put them in the budget. We specify in tight reform language how the losses would be compensated. And we think it's good budgeting.”