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family farmers and their communities. We also urge the committee 

 to consider new initiatives and policies to accelerate the progress 

 that is so critically vital to our future. 



The Tashkent hit is great for us to sustain our lives and our live- 

 lihood as a farm-based agriculture, and I feel very deeply a farm- 

 based agriculture and an economic democracy. 



Mr. Chairman, earlier today you referred to the collapse of agri- 

 culture in the former Soviet Union and made mention of the fact 

 that we certainly don't want to go in that direction. I would say 

 with perhaps some slight hyperbole that where we have been going 

 in these last 12 years is in fact in the direction of a command-and- 

 control farm economy from which the former Republics of the 

 Soviet Union are now trying to extricate themselves. We still have 

 time to avoid that problem. 



You and we share in the responsibility to reclaim the direction of 

 our farm and food policy. As family farmers, we have lost a great 

 deal over the past decade. Our farm-based rural communities have 

 been depopulated. If this trend is not reversed, the entire economy 

 and the entire country will be paying the price and the social costs 

 of these shifts. I might say that it already is. 



There is something else that I am seeing. I am 51 years old and I 

 am starting to look around at my community and how people live 

 and deal with each other and in my State of Wisconsin especially. I 

 see a crumbling, a breakdown, and a weakening of the moral struc- 

 ture — in this case, I want to make an illustration specifically of the 

 dairy situation in Wisconsin. 



In the State of Wisconsin for the last 2 years the State govern- 

 ment has held hearings on the legitimacy for above border premi- 

 ums that dairy plants, processors, and co-ops are paying to farmers. 

 It has come out in investigation and in testimony that these premi- 

 ums have little to do with the — there is little economic justification 

 for some of the premiums that are paid for volume and so-called 

 quality in milk, but are in fact a subterfuge on the part of the proc- 

 essors, the buyers, to subsidize at the cost of the average dairy 

 farmer those farms that are very much larger or have given indica- 

 tion that they are willing to expand and produce even more milk 

 and are given free televisions, free hauling, premiums that are way 

 above any economic justification for the value of the milk in terms 

 of the natural market. 



When the co-ops and the farmers themselves are asked about 

 this, they say, "What can we do? It's a new day." 



In effect, not to quote anybody in particular, but in effect they 

 are saying that it is dog-eat-dog. It's every person for themselves. 



That is not the way it used to be in rural America. Perhaps that 

 is the way it was and is on Wall Street. Perhaps that is what hap- 

 pened in the savings and loan industry. That is not the way it was 

 in rural Wisconsin, but that is what we're seeing happening now. It 

 doesn't have to be that way. 



I can tell you personally and representing family farmers in 

 rural communities across the country, that there is once again a 

 glimmer of optimism with the arrival of this new administration. 

 This optimism must be translated, however, into real changes and 

 a commitment toward rebuilding our chances for economic surviv- 



