62 



reading my submitted written testimony and some off the cuff com- 

 ments about what this is doing to rural America in particular and 

 by implication what the lack of a farm economy is doing to the 

 U.S. economy as a whole. 



You can see this if you read such studies as the Purdue Universi- 

 ty's "Ag 2000" which tries to plot the trends between now and the 

 year 2000, a very short 8 years, what is happening to agriculture 

 and to our rural communities. 



They have been and they continue to crumble. In our relatively 

 lowly populated townships in northern Wisconsin, all of us as citi- 

 zens of a township have a pretty good working knowledge of what 

 happens to our local government. We in our township government 

 have foregone taxing ourselves so that we can keep up, not to add 

 to but simply to maintain our own local township roads and 

 bridges. 



We're having a harder and harder time doing it and our roads 

 are deteriorating. What is going to happen to the mail trucks, the 

 school buses, and all the rest of the economy that depends on a 

 workable road, a transportation system? 



The same can be said of our schools. In my lifetime I attended an 

 eight-grade country rural school. That was closed down in the con- 

 solidation a number of years ago and we all went into town. Now 

 the talk in Wisconsin is to close down these consolidated school dis- 

 tricts and move into even larger ones because the tax base isn't 

 there. In some cases even the school population isn't there. 



So much of this is a result of a faulty farm policy at the producer 

 level. Is this what the country wants to continue, the depopulation 

 of rural America until we get to the point of what we see in the 

 Third World with all the attendant social, political, and even mili- 

 tary unrest and violence it involves? 



This vicious cycle cf being trained in a very efficient university 

 and extension service and so forth, year by year, to produce more 

 and more, and yet for lower and lower prices that have nothing to 

 do with our cost of production — the cycle being that farmers are 

 leaving the land, businesses are leaving our rural communities and 

 going to cities where the jobs are already scarce and moving some- 

 body else out of a job, let alone the ones that are fleeing south be- 

 cause of what corporate America sees as the lure of lower wages 

 and cost of production in our trading partners. 



This cycle must be broken in order to achieve real economic revi- 

 talization in this country. That revitalization can only occur on the 

 basis of a vital rural economy, one in which farmers begin to re- 

 ceive a more equitable share of the value of the commodities we 

 produce. Frozen and even declining farmgate prices and target 

 prices are compounded by increasing costs for all of our purchase 

 inputs which continue to jeopardize our survival in our communi- 

 ties where we live and do business. 



We face the same problems with inadequate health coverage and 

 weakened infrastructure as the rest of the country is right now. 



Something is fundamentally wrong when Kellogg's and General 

 Mills can implement — and I am not picking them out in particular 

 because it is true of the whole industry — but when they can put 

 across a 3-percent increase on every box of cereal while the farm 



