Kent Conrad: “I rise today to support the ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee in what he is saying. I am in my 18th…”

“I rise today to support the ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee in what he is saying. I am in my 18th year in the Senate. Only once before in that entire time have we taken money from other farmers to provide the funds to cover a natural disaster for others. That is just wrong. That is not the way we have operated. We have always dealt with natural disasters through emergency funding because none of us can know who is going to get hit by a natural disaster. None of us can know who is going to have a hurricane or a drought or a freeze. In my State we have had three of the four. We didn't have hurricanes. We don't get hurricanes in North Dakota. But we have had drought in the southwestern part of the State. I have just taken a drought tour, and it looks like a moonscape. Nothing is growing. It is disastrous. The corn crop is about a foot high. There are no ears in the corn crop. I go to the northern part of my State, and it is flooded. It is unbelievable. We have a lake in north central North Dakota called Devils Lake. That lake has risen 25 feet in the last 7 years. That lake is now 22 times the size of the District of Columbia, and it has risen 25 vertical feet, taking up hundreds of thousands of acres. We, as a Federal Government, have already had to buy out the entire town of Church's Ferry. We have had other towns that are on the brink of being swallowed up. We have spent tens of millions of dollars protecting the town of Devils Lake.”