Thank you. After Don is done speaking we have Larry Green, then Myron Just, David Hugo and Steve -- Steve Sprinkle.

MR. HOGGESTRAAT:

Thank you. I’m Don Hoggestraat. I come from Lennox, South Dakota. I have been a past president of the South Dakota Pork Producer Council. I’m presently a member of the South Dakota Independent Pork Producers, served on the United States Animal Health Association and also on the Livestock Conservative Institute on the PRB Committee. I also helped write the eradication rules for the eradication plan. I’m retired at this point in time. I’ve raised hogs for about 40 years. I, too, am a fourth generation farmer, retired farmer. My son is now on the farm and I’m quite concerned over some of the things that are happening. Some of the things I’m going to relate to today probably don’t relate directly to this conference you got coming up, but I will end up at that point. Last week I had an interview with the British Broadcasting Company of Britain and upon visiting with them I heard that in their country the farmer is a very respected person. I told them it wasn’t that way in this country. Two months ago I had a Dutch Public Television interview at the hog farm now operated by my son. They, too, were quite impressed, especially with my name being it sounds rather Dutch and so forth. But they were nice gentlemanly-type people and they, too, were the news-media type. However, they had a little bit more feel for the farm. In plain words, they had a blast out there, which I was happy for them. Now, I realize that marketing and export is only a portion of what I’m going to be talking about. I believe, this is a little different from what we just heard, that genetic engineering is being used by foreign countries as a tool to restrict U.S. imports into their country. What we must do is prove the difference, if any, and that’s compatible what he was just talking about. I’m not so sure that those reports are all up to par that he was talking about, because in times past we have had reports that you were not to eat eggs if you had high cholesterol level. And I am one of those individuals. I’ve had heart surgery. Well, I never was an egg eater, but I still had high cholesterol. So all of a sudden about ten, 15 years later after my operation they said, yeah, go ahead and eat eggs. That doesn’t bother you. So just which side of the coin are you going to believe? It’s a challenge. Another thing that bothers me, and this we’ve heard at least 40 times today, is that we do not have a level playing field with these foreign countries. It seems like they have all the privileges and we take the brunt of everything. The United States of America is just as important as the people in other countries. Why must the farmer always be the brunt of somebody’s injustices? How they’ve come about or where they came about I do not know. I’m not accusing anybody. But I would certainly enjoy the level playing field. We are asking for policies to ensure a price that will produce a living standard for the farm that’s equal to the city cousin. That’s not asking too much. There are many farm families that are now being driven off of the land and I can really relate to that in our area. In our area we’ve had a very wet year this year. We had an abundant crop last year. The abundant crop saved some farmers for this year. Right now at this particular time there are thousands of acres that are not planted due to the wet situation. If you were to go out there with a wheel tractor you would just sink away. That would be the end of it. You’d probably see the tractor in a day or two again. But what I’m getting at is we have to be careful that we maintain a standard of living. We don’t need this exodus from the land from these people. And another thing I want you to be well aware of, and we think about it every day, is if we want cheap food that’s fine and well. But let’s provide for it so it can be cheap that we’re not driving people off the land or an exodus from the land. The trade laws are not being enforced. That causes much of this. Let’s move out of our complacency and get some action. The extreme market fluctuation is causing much unrest. Freedom to Farm is pointing to freedom to fail. Now, this is going to stir up a few angers and a few feelings.

MS. KINNEY:

Let me just say you have a minute.

MR. HOGGESTRAAT:

Three minutes?

MS. KINNEY:

One minute.

MR. HOGGESTRAAT:

One minute? Oh, okay. Well, I’ll have to speed it up a little. Okay, thank you. This Freedom to Farm is pointing to freedom to fail and this is one thing that I’m not very happy about. We have in South Dakota a new group called the South Dakota Independent Pork Producers. This organization is for all pork producers alike. We believe the mega-producers are the downfall of the industry.

When the mega-corporations have control, the price of food will go sky high, and you seen that last winter when hogs were eight and ten cents, the dressed meat in the counter -- the retail store did not come down. Now, the consolidations of these mergers has caused an over production of pork to a whooping ten percent over production. Before we had these conglomerate corporations, we were still all independents. Four percent was the highest over production we had. Now, I think there was some manipulation with these exports that we all need. Let’s not have corporations control the markets with manipulation of prices. Now, I want to relate to one thing, if I can. A few years ago a large firm bought soybeans from South America. The purchase wasn’t all that large in metric tons, and so forth, but the psychology of it was about -- the psychology was not the purchase of the beans but the psychology of it what it would do to the market. And what did it do? It lowered beans $1 a bushel, just the psychology. Now that’s manipulation and I realize you have little control over that kind of a deal, but you should be able to control such behavior with a few new regulations. This day and age money is the driving force. Be it war or be it markets, it is still money driven or maybe greed of money. Thank you.

MS. KINNEY:

Ambassador Baas.

AMBASSADOR BAAS:

I’d just like to make an observation if I -- if I could and it really doesn’t relate directly to what you said, although you mentioned an issue that’s been mentioned a lot of times here, and this certainly is not meant to denigrate anything that we’ve heard today or I believe what you’ve been telling us about the difficulty of the family farm and so on. But what I wanted to just raise is that I suspect that if we were all French or German or Dutch, or something, and having a hearing like this in Europe the tenure of the conversation wouldn’t be all that different. We would be hearing from -- we do hear from European governments and European farmers that the playing field is not level; that the United States is killing them with programs like humanitarian assistance, GSM program. Beef farmers in Europe complain that they can’t compete with our hormone fed beef, etc, etc, etc. We would hear from European farmers that their family farm is being -- is going down the tubes, that they can’t compete with the American family farm which is so large and that they have, you know, Paris very near their farm and that’s really a big problem because the suburbs are expanding and so on and so forth. So the point I’m trying to make is for negotiators this is a very difficult issue and a very difficult problem because both sides see the playing field as unlevel. It’s just which way it’s tilting. Both sides see the family farm in distress and they may be both right in that regard. And so I just want to sort of set a broader scope that we, I hope, can keep in mind as we are -- as we are going through this. And, again, it’s not at all to -- to take issue with anything that’s been raised here because I believe that, it’s just I think we need to know a little sometimes how the other side is and where the other side is coming from, as well.

MR. HOGGESTRAAT:

I would like to -- could I have half a minute? I would like to inject one thing that I became aware of the other day. I have a nephew that was instrumental working on that project of inserting that gene into the soybean to make it Roundup ready. And we got talking and discussing and he didn’t -- I hadn’t talked to him for a few years and he didn’t know where I was coming from. I knew about where he would be coming from. But he did tell me this, he said -- and we got talking about these corporations -- and he said -- this is the statement he made. He said, we are looking at to get this Roundup ready bean in the foreign countries so we can get them to produce their own beans that we don’t have that cost of transportation of moving our beans from this country to their countries. Now, that’s a little bit different than what we’re trying to do and accomplish today.

AMBASSADOR BAAS:

Sure.

MR. HOGGESTRAAT:

But underneath these corporations. I really do believe this. Thank you.