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Floor Speech

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Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I am sorry that I am here at this hour of the day on Monday, the beginning of what we hope to be the last week of this congressional session, as we recess for about a week before returning for the new session of the U.S. Congress.

I am here this evening to hope to express my hope that things that have not happened that have created challenges for farmers and ranchers across Kansas and around the country are addressed in legislation pending before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.

We have made mistakes, errors. We have failed in a couple of significant ways this congressional session in regard to the appropriations process and the consequences that the failure to pass a farm bill has upon farmers across my State and around the country.

First of all, I am saddened that we have not completed the appropriations process, the 12 appropriations bills that should have marched across this Senate floor and across the House and already been sent to the President.

In the Senate Appropriations Committee, of which I am a senior member, we passed all but one of those bills and reported them to the Senate floor with no further action. As a result of that, one of the items that has not occurred is that there is no appropriations bill dealing with agriculture that is ready for the President's signature or that should have been signed by September 30, earlier this year.

Secondly, the Senate Committee on Agriculture has not provided us with a renewed, improved farm bill. We are operating under an extension, and I would expect, before the end of the week, we will extend the farm bill one more time.

As a result, we are combining the effort to meet the needs of farmers and ranchers in this process by which we will pass a continuing resolution funding the Federal Government, presumably, to March; and included in that continuing resolution is what we call disaster assistance.

The disasters that occurred across the country--Helene, Milton; the damage that was done by tropical storms in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee--and the storm damage in many places across the country are to be addressed this week in an addition to the continuing resolution that funds the Federal Government. I support that.

There are significant challenges to people that have occurred through no fault of their own. One of those challenges is to farmers and ranchers, who, through no fault of their own, have no farm bill-- therefore, no safety net--and who have no opportunity to address the needs as they go to their bankers--their financial bankers--to plan for the new year--no farm bill in place to provide a safety net and, without passage of disaster assistance, no assistance to help them get through the planting season for agriculture commodities across the country.

So before the end of this week, we need to do serious and significant work. And the point I want to make tonight is that, without the inclusion of assistance to farmers and ranchers in the continuing resolution, I will not vote for the continuing resolution. I despise voting for them regardless, all the time. I have because I so oppose government shutdowns. But in the absence of solving the challenges that farmers and ranchers meet--through disaster assistance, through financial assistance to those farmers--the CR will not attain my vote.

So the negotiations are ongoing, as I understand it. They were to have been completed, perhaps a long time ago, but they were certainly to have been completed last night and filed. It has not happened yet, and the deadline is December 20, before there is a government shutdown.

The circumstances that we face is no--let me repeat this so I can make it perhaps clearer. Without a farm bill, there is no safety net. The safety net that was present under the old farm bill, even if extended, does not meet today's current challenges that farmers face.

The cost of inputs--fuel, fertilizer, seed, labor, land values, interest rates, in particular--have skyrocketed, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has determined that ``on the farm'' income will be down more than 43 percent over what it was when we passed the last farm bill, now 6 years ago--no farm bill to meet the needs, no farm policy to meet the needs of the challenges that ranchers and farmers have.

And then, unless we provide the disaster assistance--the natural disaster assistance that is so needed--and, again, I mentioned States that have had hurricanes. I will highlight that, in the State of Kansas, we have been in a drought for the last 4 or 5 years. This is the most severe year yet.

Seventy-nine percent of Kansas agriculture experienced drought across our State, most of it in severe fashion. This past year, Kansas wheat farmers experienced their smallest crop since 1961, largely due to lack of moisture.

So you add these things together--terribly high input costs, low commodity prices, and then if you have no commodity to sell because you couldn't grow anything--one of my staffers told me, when I said: You should be home for harvest earlier this year.

He said: Jerry, we plant wheat; we don't harvest wheat.

And that is exactly what happened across the State this year and, unfortunately, for past years.

Some will say we have crop insurance to deal with this issue. Crop insurance is hugely important to producers around the country, but it doesn't work when there are multiple-year disasters because the average for which you can receive compensation is based on previous years.

So we have never figured out--RMA, the Department of Agriculture have never figured out--a crop insurance product that meets the needs of farmers who, year after year after year, have less production.

The point I want to make is, this is a real circumstance that has huge consequences, not only on the farmers of Kansas and other States across the country but upon the need to meet our hunger needs around the world and the need to meet the nutrition and safety and well-being of Americans across the country.

Again, I ask my colleagues to make certain that the continuing resolution include assistance to agriculture producers and it be done in a way that actually meets their needs. And then, let's make certain we get a farm bill done--again, already late, but can we get it done early in 2025?
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