Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026
Floor Speech
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Mrs. SPARTZ. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is very simple: Does Congress really care about American farmers and consumers, or about Big Ag screwing them on the farms and in the grocery stores?
Does Congress really care about affordability, or is it just lip service during an election year?
All this bill does is exempt large tractors and combines from unreasonable Clean Air Act emission standards, standards we already waived for military equipment in the name of national security. Is not food security just as much as national security?
Really, Mr. Chair, how much damage to the environment is a combine going to do in 2 weeks in the field?
These emission standards, however, are doing real damage to family farms and grocery prices. They make equipment extremely costly, prone to breakdowns, and less reliable, causing delays, fires, and higher prices for consumers.
Ask any farmer about DEF, diesel exhaust fluid, and you will hear it: Farm equipment and input costs have increased 30 to 100 percent in just 5 years. Farmers are struggling to survive, and consumers are struggling to afford groceries.
These regulations only benefit large manufacturers like John Deere, controlled by billionaires like Bill Gates and BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink. You will hear a lot of BS arguments about the environment, but this has nothing to do with it. It is all about benefiting Wall Street and billionaire donors while screwing farmers and consumers.
Is it not interesting that John Deere runs two production lines, one to screw American farmers under heavy regulations and one for Brazilian farmers with no emission standards? How is an American farmer supposed to compete with that? No one seems to care about those same exempt tractors being used in Brazil or the rainforest, the lungs of the planet, being destroyed.
Democrats destroyed American mining and manufacturing, and now we appease China. Now they want to do the same to American farming, leaving us begging Brazil to feed us; Brazil, which has teamed up with Russia and China to take us down.
I know that Big Ag lobbyists are working hard through congressional staff, which many of my colleagues unfortunately are controlled by, to defeat this amendment.
These staffers have never held a real job. They are not going to be sweating fixing combines, getting covered with diesel fuel, grease, and chemicals, losing family farms, or struggling to put food on the table. They will be eating steak dinners at fancy restaurants in D.C. and trying to figure out how they can sell out our country to big money so they can get a million-dollar paycheck at the age of 30.
If my colleagues truly care about affordability, not Wall Street donors, I urge them to support this commonsense amendment. I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mrs. SPARTZ. Mr. Chair, may I inquire how much time I have remaining.
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Mrs. SPARTZ. Mr. Chair, it is very interesting. If my colleague from the other side would actually spend some time in Minnesota with farmers, I think she would have a different perspective.
Actually, as a generational farmer, my family came from Minnesota, and now I am in Indiana. If she would have spent a little bit of time actually talking to real farmers instead of trying to raise the price of commodities that a lot of working families will be paying for, she would start worrying about input costs and what it is doing to our prices and how family farms are going bankrupt, and if we continue on this path, we will have no farmers.
It is very ironic that we allow Brazil, on top of everything else, to actually buy combines and tractors with none of these standards. It is really sad for me to see what this institution has become. I came from a very terrible country with Communist corruption, and to see how reckless, how heartless we became and how we don't really care about real people on the ground and hardworking farmers, hardworking Americans that are trying to make ends meet and trying to just increase prices from everyone and getting out of the business because they know if they create oligopolies in farming and farmers are going to lose their farms, they are going to control them, they are going to drag them to this committee, and they are going to be puppets to the government. If that is what they want, that is the country I grew up in.
I hope we have some people in this institution who still care about real people on the ground, not big donors, not BS presentations, and all of these Wall Street funds like BlackRock that make a ton of money on that.
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Mrs. SPARTZ. Mr. Chair, how much time do I have remaining.
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Mrs. SPARTZ. Mr. Chair, this is one of the bad policies the gentlewoman is talking about, the driving input costs, unreasonable burdensome regulations on tractors and combines by EPA.
Mr. Chair, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Thompson).
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Mrs. SPARTZ. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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