Issue Position: Supporting Family Farmers

Issue Position

As a life-long Iowa farmer, Chuck Grassley understands the challenges for farm families to pass their livelihoods and way of life down to the next generation. Today Grassley helps operate the family farm with his son and grandson. He understands that surviving the whims of Mother Nature, foreign trade barriers and cyclical trends in the marketplace dump enough detours on the road to prosperity, and the federal government erects still more roadblocks with burdensome estate taxes and ridiculous regulations. Consider the hare-brained notion to confine so-called fugitive dust during harvest season. Grassley fired off a reality check to EPA officials and invited federal regulators to accompany him to an Iowa farm and biofuels facility to help gain a better understanding about how far-fetched some of the proposed regulations would be in the real world.

Grassley also is leading the charge to curb abuses of the farm safety net that have become a boon for the biggest farmers and a bust to taxpayers. He says the farm program is intended to help family farms thrive, not help mega-producers grow in size.

When Grassley shined light on dead farmers receiving farm payments, Americans were legitimately disgusted. The Iowa Farm News editorialized, "Grassley is trying to make certain tax dollars don't end up in the wrong hands. It's high time USDA officials take their oversight responsibilities seriously."

Grassley is continuing his efforts to keep the Department of Agriculture on task enforcing strict limits on farm subsidies to those "actively engaged" in farming, and he's working to enact more reasonable limits on farm payments to ensure that those payments go to small- and medium-sized farmers to get through the ups and downs of farming, just as the law intended.

From his influential committee assignments on the Senate Judiciary and Agriculture Committees, Grassley is an outspoken advocate to curb anti-competition and vertical integration, especially in the livestock sector, that create an unlevel playing field for independent producers to get a fair shake at the slaughter house gate.

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