Farm Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to spend a few minutes on a major piece of business this week, our 2018 farm bill.

Unlike so much of what comes to this floor--or never comes to this floor, never makes it to the floor--this is not a 5-month bill or a 5- week bill or a 5-hour extension; this is an honest to goodness 5-year farm bill. That is 5 years of certainty and predictability for our farmers and ranchers. It is a testament to the great work of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and I want to thank Chairman Roberts and Ranking Member Stabenow for leading yet another bipartisan, consensus-driven process.

When Democrats were in charge way back in 2014, we passed a bipartisan farm bill then. Now we are doing it again, only this time the Republicans are in charge. That is how this place should work. We have set aside the political antics and focused on our farmers and ranchers and rural communities, especially when they have all faced more uncertainty than they have in years.

In Colorado we have dealt with years of persistent drought. In the southern part of my State, waterflows in the Gunnison and Animas Rivers are at less than half of their average levels. Feed shortages are even forcing ranchers in Southwest Colorado to sell off their cattle. Besides drought, our farmers and ranchers are contending with erratic commodity prices, a broken immigration system that is actually putting some of them out of business because they can't find workers, and uncertainty over trade because of the administration's unusual approach to foreign policy. All of this has made it harder for them to plan for the next 5 months, let alone the next 5 years. This farm bill cannot come soon enough.

The Agriculture Committee has put together an excellent piece of legislation. For the first time in 80 years, this bill legalizes hemp. We forget, but hemp was widely grown in the United States throughout the mid-1800s. Americans used hemp in fabrics, wine, and paper. Our government treated industrial hemp like any other farm commodity until the early 20th century, when a 1937 law defined it as a narcotic drug, dramatically limiting its growth. This became even worse in 1970 when hemp became a schedule I controlled substance.

In Colorado, as is true across the country--I have talked to a lot of colleagues about this--we see hemp as a great opportunity to diversify our farms and manufacture high-margin products for the American people. That could help drive incomes in rural parts of my State, like Montrose County, CO.

Let me tell my colleagues about Montrose. It is a rural mountain area on Colorado's West Slope. It flattens out to the west. I managed to win 29 percent of the vote there in 2016, and I managed to win 29 percent the first time I ran as well. I can't seem to improve my position.

I want to show my colleagues a picture from there. This is from Montrose. Here is their Republican State senator, my friend Don Coram, who is standing right here, standing in front of a hemp plant. This is his greenhouse. He was kind enough to let me visit this past March. He told me that hemp growers operate under a shadow of uncertainty, worried that at any moment somebody in the Justice Department is going to wake up one morning and decide to cripple their operations by targeting their access to water or labor.

When we passed the last farm bill in 2014, Colorado farmers harvested around 200 acres of hemp. Last year, we harvested 9,000 acres, and that is despite the uncertainty around hemp's legal status. Our farm bill eliminates that uncertainty by legalizing hemp.

If this farm bill passes, our growers are going to have a much easier time opening a bank account, buying and selling seeds, transporting their goods, and accessing water.

This bill also gives hemp growers access to important risk management tools, like crop insurance.

That is hemp that Don Coram, my Republican politician friend, is standing in front of at his greenhouse. This means dollars for rural Colorado and rural America, where the ingenuity and the creativity of people is already being unleashed on a crop that, until this farm bill was written, we could not grow in our country in a meaningful way and whose byproducts--the things that will create margins for our farmers-- were imported from Canada.

Go into stores in the United States today and you will see hemp byproducts, hemp products, but they are grown in Canada. That doesn't make any sense. I am glad this farm bill fixes it, and I am glad the majority leader was the one who led the way on that.

Looking ahead in the West, we know that the risks of drought and wildfire are only going to grow worse. That calls on us to make sure that risk management tools are using the best available data. Over the past year, we have worked with Colorado's ranchers to make sure the USDA has good drought and market data for livestock disaster assistance.

In uncertain times, these programs are critical to sustaining our farms and working lands, which are fundamental to our heritage in the West and the legacy we hope to leave the next generation.

The same is true of our vast grasslands, healthy forests, and abundant wildlife. They are also fundamental to what it means to be in the West, which is why we made sure this farm bill emphasizes conservation and responsible management of our natural resources.

In this bill, we increase funding for conservation easements. We also make the EQIP Program easier to access for small farmers and ranchers. That idea came directly from Mike Nolan, a vegetable grower in Mancos, CO, who was having trouble accessing conservation tools designed more for big farms than for his 7-acre operation.

We reward farmers in this bill for improving soil health. We strengthen the Regional Conservation Partnership Program and reduce redtape for projects that improve drought resilience.

We increase funding for voluntary wildlife habitat improvements on working lands--an approach in Colorado that has helped us protect habitat for iconic species like the Greater sage-grouse but to do it on our own and in collaboration on the ground.

In Colorado, forests are one of our most important natural resources. The health of our forests affects the strength of our outdoor economy, the quality of our water, and the safety of our communities from wildfire. This bill doubles funding for collaborative forest projects that promote forest health and reduce wildfire risk. It creates a new water source protection program to bring utilities and upstream communities together around forest health. It also requires the Forest Service to evaluate the health of our watersheds and monitor the effectiveness of treatments, and it provides new authority for the Forest Service to work with local communities on housing and infrastructure--a major issue in our mountain communities.

Finally, this bill makes new investments in our rural communities by expanding access to high-speed internet and encouraging projects to improve energy efficiency, energy storage, and cyber security.

Working with Senator Daines, we also maintain funding for the Voluntary Public Access Program to increase opportunities for hunting and fishing, which are so important to our outdoor recreation economy.

All in all, this is a good bill. It would materially improve the lives in communities in Colorado and across America--something I don't get to say a lot about our work around here.

It is even more impressive because the farm bill is not some tiny piece of inconsequential legislation. It is among the most complex things we do as a Congress. It touches every region of our country-- urban and rural--and involves thousands of different, often competing, interests. It affects the lives of every single American--whether they know it or not--through its investment in our food, forests, water, and wildlife.

We passed this bill 20 to 1 in the Agriculture Committee. I told the majority leader the other day, when he came for our markup in the committee, that I wish he would send everything through the Agriculture Committee. Then we might actually get something done for the American people around here.

We might fix our broken immigration system to make sure our farmers have access to the labor they need. We might address the threat of climate change and the strain it will put on our food systems. We might address the backlog of infrastructure projects in rural Colorado and all across the West, where some of our pipes and dams date back to the 1950s. We might push for coherent trade policies that increase market access for our farmers and ranchers, instead of subjecting them to retaliation and uncertainty.

There is a lot we could do if we took a page from the Senate Agriculture Committee and approached our work not oriented toward a political fight for the benefit of cable news but oriented toward a solution for the benefit of the American people. We need to get back to that kind of work around here.

We can start by passing this bill and giving our farmers and ranchers the certainty they deserve from our government. Given all they do for us--providing the food, fuel, and fiber we rely on every single day-- that is the least we can do for them.

I thank my colleague from Arkansas, who has joined me on the floor and has been such a great member of the Ag Committee as we brought this bill forward.

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