MR. LAMB: Let me first commend and thank Iowa Secretary Patty Judge for her involvement in helping, I guess, set this process up. I fully understand her, being a farmer, her understanding and her concern about the potential train wreck in Iowa agriculture. So thank you, Patty, and I hope, Tom, you take back to the Secretary of Washington our sincere thank you in Iowa to him for help setting these meetings up, as well as our counterparts from the very heart of the Heartland from Missouri and Kansas. We thank you all for taking time out of your schedules to be here.

Good, bad, or indifferent, like it or not, the times dictate we are locked in a global economy. And if you'll recognize and admit that, then you must understand that in the global economy, exports and trade can be and must be a vital part of agriculture's future. But yet as I say that, if one person in this room, in this auditorium, believes that exports, and exports alone, will stop or stabilize the potential train wreck that's heading for us, then we're all living in a fantasy world. It can be part of it, no question about it.

Earl Busback in the early '70s, former Secretary of Agriculture, told us the world is our market. We tried it. It didn't work. We tried to gamble in the latter '70s and early '80s, and we experienced the most serious farm crisis since the Great Depression, and now once again within the framework are the flaws of weaknesses of the Freedom to Farm. We put our hope and our future again on exports and exports alone. And once again, we're seeing that that kind of thinking has to be fundamentally flawed.

So what I'm saying is we have to have a long-term visionary domestic public policy in this country to compliment trade and export opportunities. If we don't, we are going to lose a huge part of our economic, social, and community rural infrastructure. Not only in Iowa, Patty, but in this country as well.

There's an economist from California by the name of Steven Blank. He's written a book called The End of Agriculture, an American Portfolio. Haven't read the book, but I visited with him. He believes the trends in technology, communication, transportation, processing, dictate that we are giving up on the American farmer, and that at one point in time in the near future, we will become a major food importing nation rather than a food exporting nation. He believes the trends are telling him that a big share of our food will be produced on third world plantations because in a global economy, that global economy dictates that the low cost producers where land is the cheapest and that's where labor is the cheapest.

We are already estimating that about a third of our land and a third of our dairy products we consume is now imported. 50 percent of the hamburger Burger King uses in their restaurant, fast food restaurants, comes from Australia. So we are already importing a big share of our food.

Now, I'm not advocating building a wall around our country. I understand trade. I understand if we're going to export to a nation, we have to import something from them, but I also understand, I hope, that if there's water coming in the back door faster than you can sweep it out the front door, I'm sorry, you're going to drown, and I have a feeling that's where we're headed now.

Madam Secretary, the other night I viewed the movie "Grapes of Wrath" based on the novel by author John Steinbeck; took place in the dust bowl of the Great Depression in Oklahoma, and I would hope that everybody in this auditorium, if you haven't seen it or haven't seen it in a long time, you would view it again and remind yourself of what ignorance and power and greed and the lack of power and vision, planning, and maybe what man's inhumanity to his fellow man can really be like, and then ask yourself if now after over 60 years of farm programs that were designed to address the inherent weaknesses and vulnerabilities of agriculture, that were designed to address the terrible inequities that we saw way back in the depression era, if now once again we haven't returned to the days and the atmosphere that spawned the novel and the movie Grapes of Wrath.

I fully understand the times are different, the technology is different, the people are different, some of the reasons are different, but the same end result. Thousands of good, decent people are being torn from the land, not because they failed, but because they do too good of a job. They have provided this nation and the American people with the widest variety of the safest food at the average lowest cost of any developed nation in the world.

Now we have responded to the Freedom to Farm Act, the weather has cooperated, we produced huge surpluses, and there's no place for us to go with it. And the price, I'm afraid, Madam Secretary, the prices this fall, we're not going to know where the bottom is. There's no way of judging where the bottom is going to be. We're going to see a real bloodbath out here.

Let me simply close by leaving you all with this one thought: For nearly 40 years, Norris Elbert was an editor of a small local newspaper in north central Nebraska. For nearly 40 years he spoke of values and virtues that were deeply embedded in rural communities, and he often spoke of the values not only that were out there, but of this special bond, this special relationship between the land and the people who live on it; those of us who work the ground and till the soil. And in his last publication, and his last editorial and his last paragraph he closed it with these words: "I have watched the butterfly struggle against the winds of the gale, and its performance gives me hope, for if an insect can overcome nature's monumental struggle, than surely, surely humans are capable of recognizing and resolving their own man-made mistakes."

I would guess, ladies and gentlemen, that only time, good well-thought out public policy, and good, decent people like yourselves will ever accomplish Norris Elbert's prophecy. We are beyond a time to choose; it's time to act. The choice is in your hands. All I urge you to do is choose wisely. And one thing I am certain of, at some point in time, years or decades, no one on this panel, or no one in this auditorium, can ever attempt to make the argument you were never warned of the impeding crisis that was coming to agriculture in rural America.

Thank you, Madam Secretary, for your time.