The Agricultural Act

Floor Speech

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, after more than a year of debate, negotiation and compromise, the farm bill has finally been approved. This legislation is a win for the family farmers and rural economy that is at the heart of Upstate New York. While the final product does not include everything that we fought for, the farm bill's passage was of the utmost importance to New York. It maintains or grows scores of programs for our dairies, fruit and vegetable farmers, maple syrup producers, rural development projects and iconic New York companies like Hickey Freeman in Rochester, NY.

The farm bill is unique in that it touches the lives of all Americans by ensuring the health of our nation's food supply. It does that by supporting our hard working farmers. The bill supports innovative agricultural research that helps make our farms some of the most productive on the planet. I am proud that this will include the Acer Access and Development Program or Maple Tap Act, which will provide grants to promote maple tapping and research across New York. This bill makes common sense reforms like eliminating direct payments and expanding opportunities for crop insurance and even linking crop insurance with conservation compliance. This bill does this all while providing a safety net for our farms that often face unpredictable natural disasters.

However, this bill is more than just an agriculture bill; it is the bedrock of our food and agriculture policy for the next 5 years. The Farm Bill will drive our rural economy into the 21st Century by making investments not only in our farms, but in water, broadband, and energy infrastructure. This bill provides opportunities to grow small business in rural communities, such as helping a rural entrepreneur turn grandma's award winning jam into a commercial product ready to be sold on store shelves across the great state of New York and across the country. This farm bill pulls our rural and urban communities ever closer, as it expands opportunities for farmers markets and food hubs to communities that for so long have lacked access to local fresh food.

Another very important provision in this bill that I would like to highlight is extension of the Wool Trust Fund. For more than a decade we have had in place this successful program to protect the workers at American manufacturers of men's suits from an unfair trade anomaly. While we allow finished suits to be imported into this country duty-free from many countries, we impose a 25% duty on the fabrics that our domestic suit manufacturers must import. This anomaly has acted as a huge tax on companies that wanted to stay and manufacture here in the United States. Therefore, more than a decade ago, we enacted the Wool Trust Fund program to provide both duty refunds and licenses to import limited quantities of suiting fabrics at reduced duties. The combination of these steps helped to level the playing field and keep manufacturing jobs from moving abroad.

The Farm Bill will extend and modify this program. For example, it will consolidate the duty refunds and duty reductions with the intention of maintaining the same amount of benefits for the same manufacturers as would have been achieved under the current program. While the program has been modified it continues its central purpose--providing a mechanism to reduce the tariff burden of companies that stay in the United States to manufacture apparel without harming the domestic textile industry.

I am proud to say that one company that benefits from this program today, and that will continue benefiting, is Hickey Freeman and its 410 employees in Rochester, New York. I am proud to be a customer of this iconic brand. I am also proud to have stood up for these workers by helping establish this program more than a decade ago and extending it through the years. I am certain that the provisions of this bill will be implemented as intended so that Hickey Freeman and its employees--along with many other companies in New York and across the country--will continue to benefit fully from this program in the same way that it has benefited for more than a decade.

From suit manufacturing in Rochester to maple taps in the Adirondacks, from dairies in the Central part of my state, to apple, pear, cherry and berry growers in the Hudson valley, from the wineries at end of Long Island to those near Niagara Falls, the industries that bring life to our rural communities will be better because we passed this Farm Bill. Their crops will grow fuller and stronger, and so will our economy.

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