MR. COOPER: My name is George Cooper and I am CEO of Glade Grove Supply Company and I have abbreviated my statement down to -- it was one page at the beginning but now that we have more time this afternoon I'll be able to read the entire presentation.

Not really -- having no formal education, being the product of the Dade County School System, I don't know that many words. My family has been pedalling iron to the south Florida agricultural community since 1938. Somebody asked me the other day, he said, "You've been in farm machinery all of your life?" and I said, "Not yet," but it seems like it's turning out that way.

We operate dealerships in Motley, Belle Glade and Avon Park. My accountant assures me that would qualify me as a three-time loser in any court of law in the state of Florida. We're basically in the sugar industry in Belle Glade, which farms about 500,000 acres of the very finest, most productive soil in the world.

We employ about 15,000 people directly in Belle Glade in the sugar industry. All the 40,000 people that live in the four small towns on the south end of the lake are in the sugar industry. So always put it in personal as to who the lives are. We also have much far-reaching than that. We run Case International's tractor plant in Fargo, North Dakota for two weeks every year just providing the tractors that go into the Belle Glade area.

When I came out of southeast Asia in 1963 four percent of the population of the U.S. was involved in agriculture. It's less than half that now. We've lost a population. We've lost the votes. You can pretty well step on agriculture with impunity as far as the votes are concerned but not as far as fairness goes.

By the year 2010 eight percent of the agriculture in the United States will be produced by less than 120,000 different entities. That's what American agriculture has done to provide you with fresher, better, safer and more variety food than any other place in the world at a much cheaper price than anywhere else in the world.

As you negotiate these things, I want you to remember that it is not all in one basket. You said, "Well, we'll give up a little on sugar here and we'll get back on corn there." It doesn't work that way. You give up on sugar, you pulled the sugar guy down, too. He doesn't go out to the midwest and grow corn. So you've got to remember it's not one basket, it's a lot -- it's thousands of little baskets of everybody. So negotiate in kind.

Something that has happened in the last 20 years that I've been in business -- well, in the last 15 years -- I sold a tractor the other day. Basically it did the same work, but looked a lot different -- the paint job was different, different cab on it, for $55,000. I sold that essentially same tractor 15 years ago for $15,000. The price of sugar was the exact same to our farmers now as it was 15 years ago. We have done that for 15 years by mechanizing the sugar industry in Florida. We've done a good job of it and we've done it in the face of enormous environmental concerns.

If you take out an acre of our land and put it in the glades, to replace it with sugar production anywhere else in the world will take three acres and most likely that will be tropical rain forests in South America and Africa and that only lasts for five or six years and then they have to move off of it. So you'd wipe out three acres of rain forest for every acre of sugar that we lose in the state of Florida.

As we sit here today, one of our sugar mills, 10 percent of our production of sugar in the state of Florida, is being auctioned off. Fifteen hundred jobs are lost directly plus the other 1,000 or so jobs related to that company are being -- are eliminated today. If that was anywhere else there would be a human cry of so-and-so lays off 1,500 workers in West Palm or Dade County or whoever, but we're going without a whimper and very quietly. So remember that in negotiating. Your negotiators are in a lot of little baskets, not all one. Thank you.

(Applause.)