Thomas Mott Osborne: “I rise to support H.R. 2646, and really for several reasons. One is I have been very impressed by the process that the…”

“I rise to support H.R. 2646, and really for several reasons. One is I have been very impressed by the process that the committee has gone through. This bill has been in development for 2 years. We have had hearings all across the country. We have had roughly 50 different agriculture, environmental, conservation groups appear before the committee. They have been asked to write the bill as they see it ought to be. So everyone has had input. It has not been done in a closet. I think that the chairman has been very fair in the way he has approached it. This is the only comprehensive farm bill in existence in this Congress or in the Senate as well. It deals with commodities; it increases conservation expenditures by 80 percent; it deals with rural development; research increased by 20 percent; and trade. There are some questions that have been raised already, and I am sure they will come up later today. Why do we have payments to wealthy farmers? In Nebraska, there are 54,000 farms. We have roughly nine entities that receive payments of $500,000 or more. These are multiple entities where you have aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters, so they are not single farmers that are receiving this amount of money. This is one out of every 6,000 farms that receives a large payment. The return on equity is roughly 4 percent. If you take the government subsidies out of farming, you go to a zero balance, or below zero.”