Dusty Johnson: “Will the Senator agree that one of the things this institution needs to do is step back and recover its institutional…”

“Will the Senator agree that one of the things this institution needs to do is step back and recover its institutional memory, its recognition of why we arrived at the price support system in the first place, going back as long ago as the 1930s and the agricultural stabilization service? There was a recognized need then, generations ago. Family agriculture, it would seem to me, cannot sustain itself without some stabilizing force. Otherwise, they simply will not be capitalized well enough. They will be driven off the land, just as what was happening at that time, and we need that kind of a presence not to micromanage, not to deny the flexibility that our farmers need to meet the forces in the market, but that they need an opportunity to compete fairly with a more stable kind of environment. We, in fact, are losing sight of that--assuming that the $6 wheat when Freedom to Farm was passed would be here forever, that the $5 corn when Freedom to Farm was passed would be here forever--and we find it out only a few years later, conveniently after the next elections, when prices have declined. Does the Senator concur that a handful of years of declining transition payments, a pat on the back and a 'good luck, buddy,' is not a reasoned, long-term strategy for family agriculture and the provision of food in this Nation, and now that there is great urgency, we need to step back and accept that that was misguided?”