46 



wastes. Either of these situations would create undue hardships for 

 family farmers. In general, such sales would only produce extreme- 

 ly limited sales, generally between neighbors. 



There may be other ways to define incidental sales, and we 

 would consider those ideas. Farm Bureau does believe that the in- 

 dividual farmers we seek to protect through a "save and sell inci- 

 dental amounts" provision are not the farmers who have benefited 

 by the vagueness of the current farmer exemption. A balanced ap- 

 proach can end extensive "brown-bagging" while preserving farmer 

 options. 



Farmers who grow protected varieties of seed for breeders or 

 seed companies should be protected in the event that the contract- 

 ing party does not abide by the terms of the contract. Farm Bureau 

 would support amendments to S. 1104 to allow a farmer to sell pro- 

 tected varieties according to local commercial law if the contract 

 with the farmer is broken or delivery of seed under such contracts 

 is refused. 



The American Farm Bureau Federation supports amendments to 

 the PVPA which are beneficial for all of U.S. agriculture. Some 

 components of the UPOV treaty fall into that category and some 

 do not. We hope the subcommittee and all the interested groups 

 will, first, concentrate on workable amendments to the PVPA, and 

 second, on how these amendments conform to UPOV. 



I appreciate the opportunity to share the views of the Farm 

 Bureau with you today and we look forward to working with you 

 and others to improve PVPA. 



Senator Kerrey. Thank you very much, Mr. Neidig. 



The next witness is Ms. Becky Winterboer, a farmer from Mil- 

 ford, Iowa. 



STATEMENT OF BECKY WINTERBOER, FARMER, MILFORD, IA 



Ms. Winterboer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 



My name is Becky Winterboer. My husband Denny and I have 

 been farmers in Clay County, Iowa for nearly two decades. Our ex- 

 perience with the Plant Variety Protection Act has been very real, 

 very personal, and very painful, and that's why I'm here today to 

 tell you how it affects the farmers individually and that it is so im- 

 portant to keep the farmers' exemption in the act and to allow cer- 

 tain farmers to save and to sell seed. 



My husband and I own a small family farm, and for years, neigh- 

 boring farmers would bring us their seed, their crops to clean for 

 seed. We set up a small facility to clean our seed and our neigh- 

 bors' seed, store it, and then return it to the neighbor for them to 

 replant the next year. 



Eventually, some of our neighbors asked us if we could just pro- 

 vide them with some of the seed from our harvest. This would save 

 everyone a lot of time and trouble, and we simply cleaned our own 

 seed and sold it to these same farmers. In this manner, we saved a 

 lot of trouble and expense of delivering the seed back and forth. 



Nevertheless, before we did this, we checked into the State laws 

 and authorities and they told us that the PVPA did not prohibit 

 seed sales to other farmers. We were assured that the farmers' ex- 

 emption under the PVPA permitted farmers like us to sell seed to 



