Joseph T. Burns: “In the Senate today, when we passed the income averaging for our farmers and ranchers in Montana, we fulfilled a…”

“In the Senate today, when we passed the income averaging for our farmers and ranchers in Montana, we fulfilled a commitment that we made to those farmers and ranchers when we passed Freedom to Farm. We are in a transition; subsidies are going away, and now we are providing a vehicle, a tool with which we can maybe ride out the good years and prepare for the bad years without too much trouble. I express my appreciation to the chairman and the ranking member of the Finance Committee for their help, also the efforts made by Senator Roberts of Kansas and Senator Bumpers of Arkansas, Senator Conrad of North Dakota and Senator Bond of Missouri and Senator Hagel of Nebraska and my friend and colleague, Senator Baucus from Montana. Without help from those Senators on this issue, I am afraid we would not have been as successful as we were in justifying and trying to pass income averaging. It is very important. Who is it important to? It is important to the young farmers and ranchers just starting. We know they will have good years and we know they will have bad years right behind them due to the elements of Mother Nature, to prices of commodities raised on our farms and ranches. This allows a way to hang on and spread that income out and survive in agriculture. After all, we produce the best food, the most of it, the cheapest of any country in the world.”