59 



of you who have fairly urgent time constraints, if you would let me 

 know, and we may take your testimony out of order. Otherwise we 

 will proceed. 



Ms. Hendricks. I also have a flight back. 



Mr. Johnson. You have the same? You have a what? 



Ms. Hendricks. A 2:15 p.m. flight back. 



Mr. Johnson. All right. We will keep that in mind. 



Mr. Diedrich, because of your urgent need to move along and 

 catch a flight, we will take things out of order and begin with your 

 testimony. 



And again, to members of this panel, we thank you for being 

 here and also accept your full written statements into the record. 

 And to the degree that you want to summarize or otherwise briefly 

 restate your statements, do whatever you feel most comfortable 

 with. 



And what we will do is go through the testimony of all members 

 of the panel and then reserve questions from the subcommittee at 

 the conclusion of all panel members' testimony. 



Mr. Diedrich, begin. 



STATEMENT OF LARRY DIEDRICH, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN 



SOYBEAN ASSOCIATION 



Mr. Diedrich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I very much appre- 

 ciate being invited to this hearing, and I am glad that you took this 

 opportunity to have the hearing. 



I will condense my remarks. Unfortunately, what I will be con- 

 densing out is all the "thank yous" for all the work that you folks 

 have done and being good listeners and being very responsive to 

 the needs of the farmers in rural communities because of this huge 

 disaster we have had this year. It has been very much appreciated. 



What I would like to touch very briefly on is a couple of ideas 

 that have surfaced through our association of things that we might 

 be able to improve on yet and things we need to continue to be 

 more aware of. 



One thing that we talked about and we visited a little bit with 

 the Secretary on is the fact that, in the budget process, what you 

 folks — and particularly you, Mr. Chairman — were very fortunate to 

 eliminate the origination fee on the soybean loan program; and 

 that is being done and will be done for the 1994 and beyond crops. 



A concern that we brought up is the fact that farmers are going 

 to be very much in need of a lower interest loan program. The prec- 

 edence is already set for the 1994 and beyond crop. 



Is there a possibility that we can extend that elimination of that 

 fee for this 1993 crop? So farmers, rather than inventing a new 

 way to get low-interest loans out to them, we can at least have a 

 competitive loan program through the soybean owned program, one 

 that we will be seeing in 1994 and beyond, once again, including 

 that in 1993. 



We also know that the full extent of the crop loss will not be 

 known until harvest is complete. However, based on our assess- 

 ments to date, it is apparent that the crop damage is highly irregu- 

 lar, both between farms and on individual farm tracts, particularly 

 in the Midwest. In some cases, production on entire tracts have 

 been lost due to prevented planting or flooding. 



