November 5, 2007

Dear Colleague:

Over the last few days, the letters that I have sent to you have sought to inform of the tremendous need for a new direction in our current farm policies.  Today, I am sharing with you just how far our efforts resonate by providing articles from news publications across the country that support constructive reform.

Consider an editorial published on November 3, 2007, in the New York Times, “The choice facing the Senate lies between an old-fashioned bill produced by the Senate Agriculture Committee and an entirely different bill that is expected to be offered as an amendment by Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican, and Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey.  The old-fashioned bill…would perpetuate a system that directs more than half of all farm payments to less than one-tenth of the farms, most of them concentrated in eight states and most of them producers of big row crops like corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat and rice.”

On October 29, 2007, the Dallas Morning News wrote, “The proposal from Mr. Lugar, of Indiana, and Mr. Lautenberg, of New Jersey…presents a refreshing contrast to the business-as-usual plan the Senate Agriculture Committee passed.”

And, the following day, the Washington Times wrote, “At the very moment that the mutually back-scratching, special-interest-dominated agriculture committees in both congressional chambers have reported terrible, business-as-usual, five-year agriculture-reauthorization measures, the Lugar-Lautenberg FRESH alternative is truly a breath of fresh air.”

As the Senate is poised with a choice about the future of our farm programs, I invite you to review these publications.  Senator Lautenberg and I, along with a group of bipartisan co-sponsors, have made the choice to reform our current farm bill to improve the safety-net for our farmers.  

Read the newspaper articles supporting farm bill reform