Collin Peterson

Mr. PETERSON

Mr. PETERSON. I thank the gentlelady. I, too, oppose this amendment. People need to realize that the diesel engine was invented by a German fellow named Diesel, and it ran on peanut oil. It didn't run on diesel fuel. And the internal combustion engine ran on ethanol. It didn't run on gasoline. They had to reengineer those motors to get them to run on gasoline and diesel fuel. It takes a different type of engine to run those kinds of fuels. One of the things you do with this type of a program is you help those manufacturers develop engines that can utilize the fuel. The same thing with a car engine. Down in Brazil, they're burning 30 percent ethanol with cars that are made by General Motors that are engineered to run on that fuel, and they get better mileage with that 30 percent ethanol than they get with gasoline because they engineered the engines right. That's what we're trying to do with this program is help the industry be able to utilize these fuels which are renewable and are made by Americans and are creating jobs. So this is a good program, and I oppose the amendment.

Mr. PETERSON. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PETERSON. Will the gentlelady yield?

Mr. PETERSON. I'm not sure I'll need 2 minutes. This is basically an earmark, and basically all kinds of people want to put in bills to allocate their money to ARS. We don't have enough research money for wheat and whatever else. We can't be doing this because it's going against everything else that was agreed to. I thought you guys had decided we weren't going to have any earmarks, we weren't going to do these kinds of things. So I would hope that we would not support this amendment, and I join the gentleman from Arkansas in opposing it.

Mr. PETERSON. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PETERSON. On that last point, the University of North Dakota, one of their ag guys up there came up with a way to splice a fluorescent gene into hemp, and North Dakota is a State where it's legal. So now the hemp that grows is fluorescent. So you can clearly tell the difference between the hemp and the marijuana. So we have solved that problem through research.

Mr. PETERSON. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I, too, must reluctantly rise to oppose this amendment. The Hunger- Free Community Program is in the Senate bill, and I think there's wide support for this. The problem is what's happening here with this amendment is we're taking mandatory money from the Market Access Program, which is an important program for a lot of different reasons that were discussed just in the last amendment, and we're taking money from that program, which is in title III, and moving it to this hunger-free community program which is in title IV. And I just don't think that we want to be taking mandatory money and moving it between titles. So I think this is something we can consider when we get to conference. It's in the Senate bill. I encourage people to oppose this amendment at this time.

Mr. PETERSON. I just wanted to say that Willie Nelson's bus runs on B-100.

Mr. PETERSON. What it does is it sets the price of dairy at 85 percent of parity, and that would have been about 39 bucks. It also sets the price of wheat and corn and soybeans at anywhere from--I don't know. It's 80 to 95 percent of parity. Those prices are just as problematic. You know what happened last December. The law expired on September 30, but nothing actually happens until that current year's crop is harvested. Wheat does not harvest until May, and corn doesn't harvest until October or November, but milk is harvested every day. That's why it became an issue. So I am against getting rid of the permanent law, but I was just curious as to why you picked on just dairy. I mean, I see your point that you're going to raise costs to the government, but if you want to really raise costs to the government, support the Goodlatte-Scott amendment because that's really going to stick it to the government.

Mr. PETERSON. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PETERSON. I thank the chairman. When I was chairman and did the last farm bill, we maintained the permanent law, and we did it for a reason, which is that it is very hard to get these farm bills done, and sometimes you need some motivation to get people to move. That's the main reason we left it there. I have a question of the author of the amendment if he would be willing to engage me in a discussion. I guess I was curious as to why you are only repealing the dairy provision of the permanent law and not the entire permanent law. Is there some reason for that?

Mr. PETERSON. Just a point. I understand what you're saying, but you need to look at the Goodlatte-Scott amendment. What it does is allow them to buy insurance at $18 a hundredweight, and if the price goes to $11 like it did in 2009, the taxpayers are on the hook. So you've got the same problem going on with what Goodlatte and Scott are trying to do in this bill.

Mr. PETERSON. I thank the gentleman. I rise in opposition to the amendment, not that I disagree with the intent here, and I think that if you look at the EQIP program, you will see that it has primarily been utilized by smaller producers around the country. But I just want to give you an example of the real world here of how this works in my district. We have the Sauk River in my district, which is a beautiful river that has probably 100 dairy farms located alongside this river. These dairy farms have been there for 75, 100 years. You know, these have been in the family. A lot of these farms are 50 cows, 75 cows, probably 100 cows would be the largest one. So these are small family farms. They've been in their families for generations. The problem is that the barns and the pastures and the barnyards were located next to the river, all along this river. That's just how they did things 75 years ago. And so what happened is that river got polluted from the manure running off, and the Sauk Lake, which is a beautiful lake, became overfertilized and it grew up with weeds and so forth. And you've seen that in the Chesapeake Bay and so forth. Well, what we did is we went in there with EQIP money and moved these barnyards and moved these cattle out away from the river. We didn't build any huge structures or anything. We built some to try to dam up things and so forth. But the point is that, even with the limitations that we had on that of the $300,000, we still had to--this was not a cheap thing to do on these farms, and these weren't big farms. So it took us 2, 3, 4 years to move each of these operations, and to move 100 of them, you know, took us, I don't know, 20, 25 years. But we have basically accomplished that, and we've cleaned up the river, cleaned up the lake. And if you had this amendment, we'd never be able to get that done. We wouldn't have--$30,000 a year would not get us anywhere near what we needed to do to get that accomplished in that area. And that's just one example. So the NRCS people and the FSA people that are involved in this, you know, they monitor these things. They're kind of prioritizing where they go. And you can see, when you look at the statistics, they've been focusing on the smaller projects. But there are times when you have to deal with things that have been put out there, not because of anybody doing anything with any ill intent, it's just what they did 100 years ago, and we're trying to clean it up. So I would caution the Members to be careful about putting any limitations on these programs because a lot of times it can have a consequence that wasn't intended. So I oppose this amendment and would urge my colleagues to do the same.

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Chairman, I want to assure Mr. Blumenauer that the chairman and I share his concerns and philosophy. But in my judgment, this is not an amendment that is necessary because there has never been a situation that I'm aware of where the continuous sign-up has been limited by anything going on. In fact, they can't get enough continuous acres signed up to meet the goals that they've had. The same thing with the CREP acres. So the Department has administratively always made room for any continuous and any CREP requests that are out there. There's never been a limitation. There's never been a backlog. There's never been any impediment to signing up these acres. The issue we have now with CRP is these high land prices and high commodity prices. You're right about that. And we are seeing acres come out all over the country, and that concerns me. I've been the biggest champion of CRP, and I reluctantly agreed to lower these acres to 24 million acres because that's what's going to happen anyway. These acres are going to be reduced. But it's not going to be continuous, and it's not going to be in CREP. It's going to be in the regular CRP program. And if I could figure out how to stop that, I would. But you'd have to literally triple or quadruple the amount of money that's paid for the general sign-up in order to get those acres back into the program, given my understanding of what's going on. So, you know, I just don't see why we need to have this in there. We have always accommodated this. If we're going to do anything in CRP, what we should be doing is figuring out how we can raise the rental rates to get the general CRP sign-up back up to where it needs to be. I'm very concerned about losing this big tract CRP because this is what has brought wildlife around the country back, and we're losing it. Anyway, there is not an impediment to continuous or CREP, and there won't be in the future. If there is anything left over that isn't up to the 24 million acres, it's going to be out of the general sign-up. It isn't going to be out of CREP or continuous. So I oppose the amendment. I don't think there is any reason to do this because the Department has been taking care of it.

Mr. PETERSON

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I want to associate myself with the comments of the chairman, who, by the way, has done an outstanding job putting this bill together. And with the exception of maybe some differences on the SNAP title of the bill, I have to say that if I was still chairman, I wouldn't have a bill that's much different than what the chairman and I have put together. And maybe one of the reasons for that is that my family has a similar background to Mr. Lucas' family. My grandfather went through the Depression. My father almost got bankrupted by Ezra Taft Benson and some of the nonsense that went on during that period of time. So the chairman is right. Policy makes a big difference in agriculture, and I stand with him in never going back to a time where we don't give our farmers and ranchers the safety net they need to operate in a very risky and now capital intensive business. So today we're debating a new 5-year farm bill. As the chairman said, the process has gone on long enough. We started the debate on this when I was still chairman, and it's time for us to pass a bill. This farm bill gives farmers and ranchers the necessary tools to provide American consumers with the safest, most abundant and most affordable food supply in the world. The bill includes farm, conservation, trade, nutrition, credit, rural development, research, forestry, energy and specialty crop programs. With roughly 16 million American jobs tied to agriculture, the farm bill is a jobs bill. The rural economy remained strong during our Nation's financial crisis, and in my part of the world it was agriculture that kind of kept us going through that process. This is why the farm bill is so important. Failing to pass a new 5-year farm bill could potentially devastate our rural economy. Why would we jeopardize the one part of our economy that has been, and continues to be, working? I often tell people that the Agriculture Committee is probably the least partisan of all the committees in Congress. And that doesn't happen by accident. We listen to each other, we try to understand each other, work together, and at the end of the day, have the best interests of our constituents in mind. The bill before us today is a compromise that reflects that tradition. It's a compromise between commodities and regions, urban and rural Members. I didn't get everything I wanted; Chairman Lucas didn't get everything he wanted, but that's how the legislative process is supposed to work. The bill makes major reforms to farm programs. Repealing direct payments saves taxpayers nearly $40 billion a year, and it ensures that farmers won't get a government subsidy for doing nothing. Instead, producers are given the choice between two countercyclical farm safety programs, addressing either price declines or revenue losses, which only support farmers during difficult times. The bill also sets new income requirements so individual millionaires won't receive farm payments and continues the no-cost sugar program. H.R. 1947 also makes significant reforms to dairy programs, the result of more than 4 years of work that we've done on the committee and compromise within the dairy industry. The new dairy safety net will address the volatility of the dairy market, help consumers by making all milk prices more stable and hopefully eliminate the price spikes that have been normal in today's marketplace. The 2008 farm bill was the first farm bill to address the growing demand for fresh fruits and vegetables, local foods and organics. The 2013 FARRM Bill continues this investment by increasing funding for specialty crop block grants, providing support for the Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion programs and authorizing the very first organic check-off for research and promotion. We also recognize the challenges facing many beginning farmers by including support for outreach and education to beginning, socially disadvantaged and military veteran farmers and ranchers. The bill also streamlines and reforms current conservation programs, better targeting resources to allow farmers and ranchers to continue to preserve our valuable natural resources. Now, a lot of attention has been given to the bill's cuts to nutrition programs, more than $20 billion over 10 years in this bill. Personally, I would have preferred that we updated the income and asset limits in the current SNAP program so that we would have treated everybody in the country the same. We've looked at that, we weren't able to come to consensus, so we didn't move in that direction. So we have cuts to nutrition spending in this bill, and they've received most of the attention in this regard, but we also like to point out that there's additional support for TEFAP, increased funding for Community Food Projects with a focus on low-income communities, and it provides more resources to help USDA's anti-trafficking efforts. So, while I think it's ridiculous to cut hundreds of billions of dollars out of nutrition programs, as some Members have called for, I also don't think it's realistic to say that we can't cut one penny from these programs because clearly there isn't a government program that couldn't stand some reductions. So I think what we've done here at the end of the day is responsible reform that's a middle ground that will allow us to continue and to complete the work on this bill. So I know we're going to have a lot of amendments I guess starting tomorrow, but it's my opinion, and it's the chairman's opinion, that in order for us to get a bill conferenced, we need to go through this process and stick together on the committee so we can have a bill that can be conferenced and get this bill signed before September 30 when the current law expires. We need to keep this a bipartisan bill and not stray too far from what was approved in committee. I know that compromise is rare around here, but it's what is needed to finally get a new 5-year farm bill completed, and that is our objective. So, Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time and yield back.

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I'm pleased to yield 2 minutes to the second-ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. McIntyre.)

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I'm now pleased to yield 3 minutes to the minority whip, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer). (Mr. HOYER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. PETERSON. I am now pleased to yield 1 minute to another new member of the committee, the gentleman from California (Mr. Vargas).

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chairman, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to a new member of our committee from Illinois (Mr. Enyart).

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to another new member of the committee, the gentlelady from Illinois (Mrs. Bustos).