Farm Subsidies Quotes

The slogan that agriculture is the backbone of the nation still remains in theory and not in practice.

The majority of us don’t want to be farmers, see farmers, pay farmers, or hear their complaints. Except as straw-chewing figures in children’s books, we don’t quite believe in them anymore

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.

Keeping our agricultural sector strong and secure should be a bipartisan concern.

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.

President Lincoln’s biggest blunder was—no not General George McClellan—creating the Agriculture Department. Since 1995, 75 percent of all agricultural subsidies have gone to the largest and wealthiest 10 percent of farms.

Yes, agriculture subsidies are far too generous. They need to be reined in because they cater to special interests while distorting free market competition. Yes, the farm laws are an anachronistic mess.

The welfare of the farmer is vital to that of the whole country.

Could we do without the social safety net, without Social Security, without Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.

As a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee it has been important to me to intersect with Hoosier farmers as often as possible.

In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.

To keep farmers on the farm we must maintain a strong farm safety net, but we will also have to build a thriving companion economy to compliment production agriculture in rural America.

I do feel like food should cost more, because we aren't paying farmers a living wage. It has to cost more.

Where would Monsanto be without the U.S. farm program and world-class research labs?

Elijah Cummings and his colleagues in the House are hung up on giving more money to Puerto Rico when we have our own farmers who are fixing to lose their farm.

I have always fought for farmers getting better prices.

What our family has done is participate in the farm programs … programs I think essentially almost every farmer in South Dakota has participated in those, and they haven't been bailouts, they have been programs that the United States has put forward for farmers to participate in.

The National Policy for Farmers calls for a paradigm shift from measuring agricultural progress merely in terms of growth rates, to measuring it in terms of the growth in the real income of farm families.

With global markets ever expanding, we need to make sure that our American farmers, ranchers, foresters, and producers are well positioned to continue to lead the world.

As I've long said, the farm bill is in need of major reform. At first chance, I voted to remove direct payments. Both the House and the Senate passed bills that end direct payments, and as we move forward, I hope we can work out the rest of the issues to implement the necessary reforms.

Let me just try to give you sort of the intuitive one here on the stimulus funds. If you have a two-person economy - let's imagine we have two farms, and that's the whole world, just two farms. If one of those farmers gets unemployment benefits, who do you think pays for him? Am I going way over your heads today?

The [Agricultural] Department’s budget was $51 billion last year – more than the total net income of American farmers.

Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?

Waiver of farm loans is not an ideal solution. To ensure that the situation is not repeated, the government should focus on creating a robust system to extend the necessary ingredients of farming such as water harvesting systems, seed and fertiliser supplements.

There are more agriculture bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country.