26 



STATEMENT OF EUGENE C. BADGER, FORMER STATE EXECU- 

 TIVE DIRECTOR, FLORDDA AGRICULTURAL STABILIZATION 

 AND CONSERVATION SERVICE 



Mr. Badger. Thank you, Tom. Madam Chairman. One comment 

 I would make. You have heard a lot of discussion about the prob- 

 lems in administering the programs in Dade County. 



If it had not been for Reed Olszack and the other two members 

 of the county committee who spent timeless hours, I would guess 

 during the first 6 to 8 months they spent 10 or 12 hours a week 

 away from their businesses studying the applications and forms. to 

 try to expedite them. Without a strong committee, we certainly 

 don't have another committee that I am aware of anywhere in the 

 country that has functioned with the professionalism that Reed and 

 his folks have in Dade County. 



Otherwise you would have a lot more problems than you have 

 heard about. They did an outstanding job. 



Starting with the special needs, comparable treatment to wheat, 

 corn, and oat growers is what is needed in the specialty area. For 

 example wheat growers can be paid 65 percent of their production 

 loss and also collect crop insurance. 



If they are prevented from planting, they can collect disaster at 

 65 percent. I will digress on that for a minute. If a citrus grower 

 is going to lose 100 percent of his crop for the next 2 to 3 years, 

 is that not in the same position of a wheat grower who doesn't even 

 plant this year and we still pay him 65 percent. It looks like that 

 is great discrimination against citrus and specialty growers. 



If you have any questions about it, you can check that out and 

 find out that you do do that. In order to save some time, I will skim 

 on down to solutions because they have covered a lot of the specific 

 problems that they have had. I don't think you will solve the prob- 

 lem of disaster. You would have to write laws almost as long as the 

 budget resolution is. I think one of them was 1,800 pages last year. 



I think to solve this problem you can establish crop insurance for 

 all crops and you could consider using dollar value as a basis to re- 

 duce the cost of insurance, particularly in the specialty crops and 

 where the amount of crop left may be worth more than the whole 

 crop. 



We had some folks who lost some sweet corn. The market is up 

 to about $8 now. My guess is, notwithstanding that they have lost 

 a good many acres, whenever you take the acreage, and they were 

 insured at say $350 an acre or $500 or $700 an acre, what is left 

 is going to be worth more than what they lost, and there will be 

 no insurance payment. 



So utilizing the dollar value for the crops would certainly work 

 better in these high-priced crops. Guaranteed yields are more work- 

 able when there is large storage crops because there is less price 

 fluctuations. So if you are using yields, they are more workable 

 than price, although price would work. Crop insurance would pro- 

 vide for those with over $2 million in sales. 



You haven't heard much about it. But we did not help a lot of 

 folks who had damage. A lot of people who provided a lot of jobs 

 in the Florida area were denied benefits because they had over 2 

 million dollars' worth of sales. 



