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Floor Speech
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Mr. TUBERVILLE. Mr. President, this is my third year serving on the Senate Ag Committee. This is my first time getting to work on a farm bill. The farm bill comes around every 5 years. It sets national policy on agriculture, nutrition, conservation, and forestry.
In less than 2 weeks, at the end of this fiscal year, the current farm bill will expire.
In 2018, this bill had a pricetag of $867 billion, right--$867 billion 5 years ago, in 2018. Now, we used to think that was a lot of money, but the upcoming farm bill is almost double that amount at roughly $1.5 trillion. This is the first trillion-dollar farm bill in our Nation's history.
The enormous pricetag of the bill is driven by an 84-percent increase in SNAP, or Federal nutrition assistance, and a 58-percent increase in conservation programs--in other words, a huge increase in welfare and climate spending. Most of this new spending does not offer support for farmers.
The $559 billion increase in SNAP funding was done directly by the Department of Agriculture through updates to the Thrifty Food Plan. In other words, nobody in Congress voted for this. The $35 billion in conservation funding was done through the Inflation Reduction Act of last year. Democrats are pushing through priorities that cater to climate activists and lead Americans to become dependent on welfare benefits. Approximately 82 percent of the upcoming farm bill goes to SNAP, commonly known as food stamps. Four percent goes to conservation.
Just yesterday, we hit $33 trillion in debt for this country--yes, I said that--$33 trillion. That will be picked up--this tab--by our grandkids and their kids.
This graph here, developed by the Farm Bureau Federation, showcases the enormous increase in nutrition spending and the steady decline of farm spending over the last 50 years. As you can see, SNAP spending has almost doubled what it was 5 years ago. How is this even possible? Has poverty doubled in our country in the last 5 years? Of course, it hasn't.
The poverty rate has been between 10 and 20 percent during my lifetime--10 to 20 percent. We spent $20 trillion in the war on poverty, and we have not even moved the needle. What does that mean? That means we are not doing our job. All we are doing is we are paying for somebody else to do it. So it doesn't work.
Yet I never hear my Democratic colleagues consider how we fight poverty. We just give out money. If my colleagues on the left cared about poverty, then they would want better results. But nobody wants better results here. They want votes. Welfare spending--if we would ever get it in our heads--welfare spending does not lift people out of poverty. Are we ever going to realize that? It simply makes people more comfortable remaining in poverty, and that makes it wrong. It makes it wrong for this body that we continue down this path of poverty and not helping poverty.
Food stamps are supposed to help people stay afloat while they work to become self-sufficient, help them get through tough times--not a free walk in society. It should not be an incentive to stay home other than to train and want to get a job, but that is exactly what it has done. Making someone dependent on government is not helping them; it is hurting them.
The whole purpose of the farm bill is supposed to be to help farmers. What an idea. Yet $7 out of $8--$7 out of $8 in the farm bill is for something else. Our farmers depend on crop insurance; commodity programs such as the Agricultural Risk program--ARC, as we call it--and price-loss coverage, which is the PLC program; and disaster programs to help them deal with difficult crop yields, markets, and rising input costs.
Farmers can't control the weather or the price, and that is the reason they need help. We have to remember farmers put food on the table. But there is a lot of people who don't understand that.
These are some of the hardest working people in America, and they have too little to show for it. Back home in my State of Alabama, I have heard the struggles facing our row croppers and our specialty crop producers. They need help to deal with inflation and rising input costs. Farm production costs have increased--have increased 28 percent since Joe Biden took office less than 3 years ago. That is embarrassing. How in the world can we increase prices 28 percent in this country in 2\1/2\ years and expect the people in this country to survive, the hard-working people? Farmers included.
Fuel and fertilizer are 60 percent to 130 percent higher than they were in 2021. Folks, we can't survive with that; but my colleagues on the left are not even concerned about it--not one bit. We are just going to cut back on digging oil and gas and buy it from other countries and charge the heck out of taxpayers in the United States of America for oil and gas that we can produce here.
Other farm expenses like land, cash rents, labor, and equipment are all adding up. As a result, net farm income is projected to decrease by roughly 23 percent this year. Costs are up, incomes are down, and farmers are struggling to survive.
We are on a direct collision in this country of closing our farmers out and having to completely depend on other countries for our food and other things that we eat. Think about that--completely depend on other countries.
We just found out going through this COVID crisis that we were completely dependent on other countries for our drugs. We said: We have got to overcome that. We have got to redo that. Now, we are doing the same thing to our farmers. We do away with our food, it is over, because if you think prices are high now, they will be completely a lot higher than they are now.
The only thing that is keeping our farmers afloat is called the Farm Safety Net, but the current support levels for title I commodity programs, like cotton, peanuts, and soybeans, are not high enough to sustain our farmers over the next 5 years.
In other words, this safety net is a level of pricing. If the price goes under a certain amount, we help our farmers overcome that cutback where they can survive. The problem is, that safety net price has not risen since 2012. And we don't think the prices haven't gone up? We have lost our minds.
If we don't raise those reference prices--and right now, my colleagues on the left don't want to raise our reference prices for farmers--we are going to be buying all of our food and everything we eat from other countries. It is coming. We have got to raise our reference prices.
We have got to help out our farmers. These programs and these reference prices allow farmers to continue clothing, feeding, and fueling every citizen in this country and a lot of other countries.
Now, we don't need to idly sit by while our hard-working producers work tirelessly and barely survive under this Joe Biden economy. I ask my colleagues--I beg my colleagues--on the left to wake up, open your eyes, and support our farmers and fight for this farm bill. Raise the reference prices. Help them out. Because if we don't, there won't be a need for another farm bill. Our Nation's food security is going to depend on it, and the lives of all American citizens are going to depend on it.
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