Richard Lugar

Mr. LUGAR

Mr. LUGAR. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, without being tedious, I just simply reiterate the fact that a farm that is fertile is going to be planted. It is going to be planted by the farmer and by his children or family, by those associates he rents to. What the Dorgan amendment finally gets to, once again, is almost an insatiable desire on the part of those who want control over what is planted and, therefore, want a relationship between program crops and payments. We have been down that trail. We are trying very hard to get off that trail today. I will just simply say, in my judgment, the great fear of those who have been in supply controls throughout this time of the New Deal onward has been a fear of planting too much. It is a strange argument today to argue that somehow farmers would plant too little or nothing at all. They simply will not utilize rich resources. But given even the hard case, Mr. President, there may be some instances in which there should not be a crop planted if the land is highly erodible, if conservation dictates that it simply should not occur. That maybe becomes an option that is both rational and good in terms of the public good. In other words, there is no particular virtue in proceeding with planting a program crop when it is not economical to do so and when it might be destructive in terms of the environment. In almost every other instance, a crop is going to be planted. The question we have today is: Will farmers be able to have maximum flexibility of choice as to what to do? Or, once again, will we be back into the toils of supply control, of Government control, tied with those decisions and checks from the Federal Government? This is a transition program, Mr. President, a transition to the market. The transition is known to farmers as they enter into those programs, and farmers are perfectly free not to enter into contracts. That is also an option that is greatly feared by those who want control because many farmers might simply decide that the time has really come to plant for the market, as opposed to the Federal Government, with transition payments or without. Those choices we shall see before us, Mr. President. But for the moment, it appears to me that this is a clear-cut issue in terms of freedom to farm. I hope that the Dorgan amendment will be defeated.

Mr. LUGAR. How much time remains?

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, let us take the situation of a farmer in America who has land. This is a basic asset for that farmer. Certainly, as common- sense rules, the farmer will plant a crop on the land or attempt to use the land to obtain income. Certainly it is conceivable that there are Americans who have productive assets and might decide that they simply do not want a return from those assets. But this is improbable. Most persons of sound mind and common sense who have opportunities to utilize economic assets, do so. And they do so continuously to make a living. For example, the Senator from Iowa has pointed to a potential Kansas farmer, maybe an actual farmer, but as I recall the instance, there were as many as 1,800 acres of wheat crop, and given prices, as the Senator pointed out, that farmer might have a return of almost $200,000 from the markets that are very strong for wheat. The Senator also pointed out that a Government check for $39,000 might also come to that farmer under current programs. The suggestion was that that farmer might have the option to go to Hawaii and simply forget the wheat fields and collect the check for $39,000. That is possible as an option for that farmer, but most people would ask, what about the $200,000 that he normally takes off the farm? Mr. President, if the farmer himself is elderly, it is a very probable set of circumstances in America today that the farmer will rent the land to somebody else and share the return. In fact, that happens increasingly as farmers grow old. The payments follow the land. The probability that the land is simply going to sit there and that a Government check comes as an ample reward is, I think, in most cases a ridiculous assumption. There is the one case, Mr. President, we have to consider carefully, and that is that some farmers in America, in stretching to meet Government program histories for their crops, may have simply overreached and they may have planted on land that in fact was not very fertile and does not get very much return at all. There may be at the margin some cases where some farms, if farmed, lose money simply because the inputs into the farming and all the economic costs involved are more than the return that would come from the crop with or without the Government involved. As a matter of fact, in the Conservation Reserve Program, we have been attempting to work with farmers to set aside highly erodible land, to have that set aside as part of the program, or land that impacts upon riparian waterway safety. That, I thought, made good sense, Mr. President, in the conservation mode. Many acres probably should not have been planted if our heritage of the soil is to be retained. So farmers, in fact, have decided, as a matter once again of their own self-interest and given a government payment, to try to move away from the highly erodible lands or those that threaten waterways. But that is an economic decision that makes sense. Therefore, Mr. President, I understand the attempt of the argument to suggest that there are farmers who simply will escape their responsibilities. But my judgment as a farmer, Mr. President, is that I have known very few people in Indiana farming during my lifetime who, having a good farm there with fertile soil, did not have a crop. They may have planted it themselves, and they may have had children that worked with them. They may have had others to whom they rented the property, but the crop got planted because that was the living for the family. Those were assets that were available. And at the point when they did not really wish to use those productive assets anymore, they sold them or they gave them away to children or through an inheritance. That is the reality of agriculture in America. The freedom to farm idea comes down to the fact that we are saying to farmers they ought to have exactly that, freedom and flexibility to use their land in each and every way that would be productive and profitable for the farmer. If we once again insist that a program crop--wheat, corn, rice, cotton--be planted on that land for it to have value, to get a government payment, we are back once again into the same restrictive agriculture that so many of us have decried for a long time. I am one who rejoices that today we have a very good opportunity finally to break out of that mode of governmental restriction. Why in the world we would once again want to return to those principles I cannot understand. It seems to me somewhat disingenuous, as those who offer this amendment suggest on the one hand--and the Senator from North Dakota was the author of the amendment--others who have spoken have often pointed out very poignant cases of farmers in their States who have struggled against the weather and against great odds. But all the stories are ones of struggle. These are persons who understood how to farm the land. The question is, what sort of odds do they have to meet in order to get income? I have not heard very many stories from the Senator from North Dakota or from other Senators about their constituents who simply went to Hawaii on the beach and ridiculed the Federal Government and the rest of the taxpayers for paying them for doing nothing. As a matter of fact, farming is a struggle for a prohibitive majority of Americans who are engaged in it. It is a struggle they chose. Today we are about to give them greater flexibility to make certain that struggle is a more even one, that they really can plant whatever they want to. And they will plant. As a matter of fact, the great fear always of those who wanted controls and wanted to pin it down was that farmers would plant too much. The real secret of American agricultural debate for 60 years has been this latent fear that farmers, as a matter of fact, are so ingenious, so hard working, that if left to their own devices they would simply plant so much that the price of everything would decline precipitously. That was the basis of the New Deal philosophy, the burning of the little pigs, the plowing up of crops at the time. It was not the search for farmers going to Hawaii; it was a search for farmers who were too productive, to hold them in bounds, and to put on one restriction after another, which we have not lifted from them in 60 years. To hear the strange argument today that at the very moment of freedom, farmers are prepared to chuck all of this and say, ``We are headed to Hawaii. Send me the check,'' is not only a gratuitous insult to farmers, but it simply lacks any basis in fact and reality of anybody who is in the farming business. Mr. President, we are talking about the heart of the freedom-to-farm idea. If you pin down what has to be planted, once again, with Government restrictions and say it has to be a program crop and, by golly, we have to see it in the ground before you receive a payment, you do, in fact, defeat the whole prospect of freedom to farm, and I do not want to see that occur. I think Members ought to be alert that this is that type of amendment. It is a killer amendment, and the instinct of going for the jugular with this idea of farmers on the Hawaii beaches is, I think, well crafted to try to give a picture of persons who are idle and who are trying to do in the taxpayers. What, in fact, we have here is a situation that came out of the Balanced Budget Act. It was clear that through the payments that will occur in a 7-year period of time and diminish in money, we know constantly now that the Federal Government and all the taxpayers are assured that farming is making a very sizable contribution to the deficit relief that we have all sought to a balanced budget. The last farm bill we passed, those of us involved in it, estimated it would have a cost of about $41 billion in terms of subsidies, the basic deficiency payment for the program crops. It turned out to be $57 billion, and there have been many explanations as to how we could have been that far off. The freedom-to-farm bill we discuss today does not have surprises of that sort. The payments are known. The amounts that will be distributed are constant, as well as the freedom of farmers to plant abundantly to furnish to American consumers and to the world such abundance as we have never seen and such wealth as we have never observed in terms of our export markets and our competitive ability. That is what the freedom-to-farm act is about. I am hopeful Senators will oppose the Dorgan amendment, will retain the flexibility portions of this bill and the gist of freedom to farm, which I think is common sense and very clear to all of us.

Mr. LUGAR. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I argue against the Harkin amendment on the basis that the limits that were set in the Lugar-Leahy bill were based upon the herds in 1970. They correspond to the Clean Water Act considerations of that time, and they made sense at that time. Unhappily or happily, as the case may be, people in cattle, with hog farms, with chickens, and with turkeys, have a great number. We have made a limit of $10,000 per operation, but in meetings with producers all over the country, pragmatically the limits that we have come to seem to be a compromise between the large and the small. I visited the Iowa Corn Producers last week and they feel that is about the right level. We had the big and the small, and a great controversy was witnessed in that State. There is no magic in the figures. They seem to me to be a practical compromise. I advocate the committee text be retained and the Harkin amendment be defeated.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, the reason the Senate allowed the farmer- owned reserve to lapse was that essentially it was a very expensive storage business with 26\1/2\ cents per bushel to a farmer who wanted to store grain. But eventually over half of the money was paid to elevators and to large grain merchandisers, not to the individual farmers we are talking about here. We finally got rid of it because farmers understood it was a hangover of wheat, corn, and beans over the market. It depressed prices. I am a farmer. I have storage. I do not need 26\1/2\ cents a bushel to store for my own purposes. I market it on the basis of price. That is the way the country proceeded, and we saved $100 million for taxpayers for another subsidy that is unnecessary and unneeded for farmers.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I encourage Senators to vote against the Harkin amendment. It is, in fact, a $260 million subsidy to farmers. Deliberately, farmers have been given a rate 1 percent less for a long time, at the Treasury rate as opposed to the commercial rate. If every other business in America had a similar advantage, that might be a different story but other business people do not. There was a time when we were interested in balancing the budget in this Chamber. This was $260 million of the savings involved in that situation. All we are asking for a vote ``no'' on this is that farmers have identically the same opportunity at commercial rates and that the $260 million of savings to the taxpayers be preserved.

Mr. LUGAR. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, we are coming now to the first vote, and the order is that each side have 1 minute of explanation. The proponent of the amendment perhaps will proceed.

Mr. LUGAR. I ask unanimous-consent that the 30 minutes for debate originally agreed to in the unanimous consent request be in order and that the vote occur at the end of that debate of the Senator from New Hampshire, which will be approximately 11:35 a.m.

Mr. LUGAR. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 3450 to Amendment No. 3184 (Purpose: To strike the section relating to the sugar program)

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I know of no objection to my amendment. I ask the amendment be agreed to.

Mr. LUGAR. I ask my amendment now be the pending business, and I send a modification of my amendment to the desk.

Mr. LUGAR. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Modification to Amendment No. 3444

Mr. LUGAR. I yield back our time.

Mr. LUGAR. I am prepared to yield back time on our side unless other Senators wish to address the issue.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, on our side of the aisle we share the need for a very, very, strong agriculture development program. I have confirmed with the distinguished Secretary of Agriculture, even again this morning, about the multiple uses of that money in our rural areas, including agricultural research, as well as sewer and water grants. I think it is an important initiative. It is one that has been extremely important, President Clinton's priorities and the Secretary of Agriculture's priorities, but equally important on our side of the aisle throughout the years in hearings we have held and work we have done in agriculture development. Therefore, I share in supporting the amendment of the distinguished Senator from Kentucky. I am hopeful it might have unanimous passage.

Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that votes occur beginning at 11:30 a.m. today, that they occur in the order in which they were offered, and that the first vote is a standard 20 minutes in length, and that all remaining stacked votes in the sequence be limited to 10 minutes in length, with 2 minutes to be equally divided between each vote for explanation.

Mr. LUGAR. I ask unanimous consent that the Harkin amendment be temporarily laid aside.