Dusty Johnson: “I thank the Senators from North Dakota, Mr. Conrad and Mr. Dorgan, for their extraordinary leadership on this issue. We…”

“I thank the Senators from North Dakota, Mr. Conrad and Mr. Dorgan, for their extraordinary leadership on this issue. We have a crisis of enormous proportions across a large swath of America, from the Canadian border all the way to Mexico. My home State of South Dakota, as has been noted, is virtually the epicenter of what has been a drought, not just a catastrophic drought this year but the previous year and some portions of South Dakota going back to the year 2000. It has been devastating to our agricultural economy, but then as well to our Main Streets, to the economy of that entire region. Recently, I joined with my colleague, Senator Thune, in a joint drought tour around portions of South Dakota that have been worst hit. It was evident that the needs were urgent. We saw herds being sold off entirely, calves being sold prematurely. We saw the factory, in effect, being sold off from the livestock sector of our State. In the crop areas, we saw areas where there was corn that was perhaps 6 inches high with no ears. In other areas, you would have to get out of the pickup and kick the dust to tell what had been planted, whether it was soybeans, corn, whatever. It was entirely lost. There are stock dams without water. Farming operations--good operations--that have been in the family for generations, some 100 years or more, are in great jeopardy. So I am here today to share my support for getting on with disaster relief.”