Thank you, Mr. Louwagie. Is Paul Christ in the room? All right, I’m going to take this opportunity then -- we have caught up thanks to you and we appreciate that. Representative Ness if you would like to make your statement followed by Dave Preisler. And then we will move to the dairy portion.

MR. NESS:

Thank you, Members of the Panel. I’ve been listening to many of the same comments for the last four months as Chair of the House Agricultural Finance Committee and Role Development and it’s a very complex. And I understand it’s difficult to, I guess, I liken it almost to like putting the tail onto the donkey. We’ve all got different bioptic visions of what we could or should do. The observations that I’ve had, and I’m going to try to just be real brief and to the point with all this, but the observations that I’ve had is that about, oh, early spring over in Wisconsin they had a hot air balloon flight scheduled. It was a beautiful day and they had about 400 balloonists there and the ground winds that day were five to seven miles an hour and it seemed like a perfect day, but 2,000 feet up there were gale force winds and it was impossible to fly. I liken that onto what’s going on in Minnesota, and this agricultural crisis in our economy is that the acceleration of change that’s going on in rural America and in our ag community is far greater than we see at the ground level. And until we start dealing with the acceleration of change and those trends of change, I believe, that we’re going to have the problems stay with us for a much longer time. And I -- I bring that into a little bit more focus by my observations are at least we’ve been so production oriented, and I just read a piece by Alan Greenspan that essentially said that our -- we’ve out produced our markets. And as we continue to focus on production our problem will only get worse and when we have overproduction prices are down. And somehow we have to balance demand -- or market demand with our capabilities to operate at a profit in the farm community. And somehow or other I’m not sure how we do that. There’s a couple of things that sort of strike me and that’s kind of the paradigm that we’re just going to do more of the same. And we’ve been unable to break out of this box of we’re going to increase trade, we’re going to increase activity, we’re going to somehow or other deal with the trade barriers and all the other issues that have been addressed here this morning. But what we really haven’t talked about is increasing demand for Minnesota products. And for that matter Midwest agricultural production. And I don’t know how we’d change that paradigm, but sooner or later -- and I traveled with the Commissioner and the Governor to China and was there and visited the folks at Beijing and Jinan and Shanghai and the ag leaders. And we’re just trying to figure out how we can better create the demand for Minnesota products rather than say, we’ve got a lot, we just want to trade with you. And I observed that McDonald’s was there and there was not a place to be seated in the McDonald’s restaurant. You explain to me how they can do that. It’s a marketing but more importantly it’s helping develop the demand for good, quality agricultural products. We often use the reference of Danish hams or Canadian bacon. Why is that? There’s a perception and perception is reality that that’s better. And we do that. My biggest concern is somehow or other that we pull together as a Midwest region both in the livestock production and the commodity productions and -- and start thinking about how we develop market demand rather than trade. And if there is some way we can do that I believe the producers, the processors, the ag-business folks, everybody -- everybody that’s in the loop will benefit. I mean it’s a win-win for all of us. And we certainly look to Washington and -- and to the USDA for leadership in the coordinating of all these efforts. And somehow or other whether we’re worried about that small family farmer being able to survive. I still think I’ve got to go back to the acceleration of change. And I see it almost at an alarming rate right now with mega-mergers, and if we’re talking about even something as recent as -- as Farmland and Cenex, two major co-ops merging. And we look at the mergers of co-ops across the landscape. We look at all those things that contribute to the efficiencies of operations in -- in the production of agricultural products. I’m just not sure whether we can continue to stay that same course as the small family farmer and survive given the dynamics in the acceleration of change. But my bottom point is this; that somehow or other we’ve got to look at creating market demand to increase our market share. I can’t think of another business out there that operates at a profit, that produces more than it can sell and still sell it for a profit. We’ve either got to produce something different or we’ve got to figure out how to bring all these dimensions of agriculture together. So whether it’s mega-mergers or consolidations or corporate farms or integrations or networks or ledgers or co-ops or mergers of co-ops or the dominance of capital in the marketplace, as well in the production side. We’ve got to bring all of those people together, going beyond risk management. And I don’t know how you can provide us that kind of a leadership to redefine the paradigm that we’ve been in, more trade, more trade, more markets, but demand for -- for our products. And I would submit to you again, just as I said at the outset, that the acceleration of change in the agriculture and the production of agriculture is far greater than we realize and it’s very similar to what I use as the analogy of a -- of the balloon flight. It seems fine here on the surface. We get by for another day, another month, another year, and still we’re in the same situation, but everything around us is just spinning and we are at the -- at the front edge of that curve that helps us plan and adjust our efforts and our resources into a profitability for everybody that’s dependent in the loop on agriculture commodities.