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Robinson Farms in Lockport, NY - Thank you very much, Mike, and thanks to the Farm Bureau for their hard work. Please extend our appreciation to Paul and everybody. It’s been a real pleasure working with you over the last years now and I’m delighted to be here at the Robinson farm and I want to thank both Mr. and Mrs. Don Robinson and Mr. and Mrs. Greg Robinson. Don told me that his father Chester couldn’t make it because he’s busy selling the products today and that’s why he’s got a successful farm that’s been going for so many generations. People, you know, tend to their business. I’m really grateful that you could all join us. I have a lot of love for rural issues and I have a speech that will probably last until the first frost, so I hope you all are ready. Because there’s a lot I want to say about what we could be and should be doing. It’s exciting that we do have the wonderful accomplishment of the Niagara Escarpment and the fact that Warm Lake Estate Winery and Vineyard is part of that is terrific. It sits alongside the Niagara Wine Trail and you can see the signs as I was driving up today.

It is, I think, surprising to some people that we’re here with two generations of a six-generation family farm in New York. This farm has been in the Robinson family since 1844. And I know from my work in the Senate there are still lots of people, at least in Washington, who don’t think we have any farms, let alone six-generation farms. So I really appreciate the hospitality you have offered today to allow me to come and speak about issues that are really important to New York farmers. I hear it as I travel around the state and what some of the solutions might be for dealing with these problems.

You know right here in Lockport, we are down the road from one of the great achievements in American history and frankly in world engineering history. You know what I’m referring to. It’s not the New York State Thruway, as important as that is, but in fact it’s the Erie Canal. Lockport, in fact, is named for the locks that made the canal possible.

Before the canal came along as an economic driver, goods couldn’t get from the East Coast and New York City to move further west. But, in fact, with the opening of the Erie Canal, and with the “super flotation highway” that it provided, all of a sudden goods produced here in New York could move west. It really opened the entire country to economic development.

Some of you know that the project was kind of nicknamed “Clinton’s Ditch” for that well-named Governor at the time. And it took a lot of guts, vision, and belief in the potential and future – for something as outlandish as a canal from one end of New York to the other – to be built. A lot of people thought it couldn’t be done. But it was a boom to New York and the American economy.

Well, I think we’re at a similar historic point. It may not be that we’re going to build a canal, but we’ve got to build the rural economy in order to maintain and sustain it for the twenty-first century.

When I look at our state, about a quarter of our state’s land is farmland. About 26 of 62 counties are classified as non-metropolitan—essentially rural. We have 36,000 farms, the great majority of which are family farms just like this one. And agriculture remains one of the primary economic drivers of our state. It contributes almost $4 billion to New York’s economy. More than 1.2 million people work on farms or in farm-related jobs. Now I bet that if we took a survey, even in our state, people wouldn’t guess that. But those are the facts and they’re important for all of us to recognize. Those of you in farming, associated with the Farm Bureau, doing this for a living all your life, you know it. But much of the rest of our state, certainly much of the rest of our country, does not.

That’s why one of my first steps when I became your Senator was to create an Agricultural Advisory Board. I’ve been so grateful to Diane, and Bruce, and others, who have been so helpful over the years, to give good advice on agricultural issues. I’m also grateful to Cornell because I was the first New York Senator to have an Agricultural Fellow in my office so that we can work year round and try to see how we can do things like help the Niagara Wine Trail become a reality. You could even say that New York is a land of milk and honey, just like in the Bible, because, after all, our farmers are leaders when it comes to dairy products, to apples, to grapes, to honey, to maple syrup, to world-class wines, so many other fruits and vegetables. Don was showing me the peppers, the tomatoes, and the corn just right out there beyond the barn. So, we are a rural state, as well as a state with the largest city in the country. We have to pay attention to our rural communities and to our farms if we expect the entire state to prosper and to thrive.

At the top of the list of challenges we face is global competition and the changing economy. The kinds of employment opportunities that have historically been available are shifting away from agriculture. The vast majority of the roughly 50 to 55 million Americans who live in rural America don’t farm themselves. More than 90 percent of those who do farm rely on significant off-farm income to make ends meet. So keeping family farming economically-viable requires growth and opportunity in all sectors of the rural economy, not just in agriculture. That’s really the first point I want to make – we’ve had an agricultural policy in America for years, which has focused on a very narrow slice of our agricultural economy, I might say. But we haven’t had a rural economic development policy. I think it’s long overdue that we address how we keep all of rural New York and even beyond prospering because that in turn will help farming, and then we keeping farming prospering which, in turn, helps the rural economy.

Rural economies have worked hard to adapt, but they’ve been pretty hard-hit with all the changes going on nationally and globally. In fact, 9 out of the 10 persistently poor counties in the United States are rural counties. When you look at the rural economies in so many of our counties, rural employment is dominated by low-wage industries. You’re almost twice as likely to earn the minimum wage if you’re a rural worker than compared to workers generally. You’re more likely to be underemployed and you face a tougher time trying to work your way to a higher-paying job.

In New York, as I travel around the state, the results are pretty plain to see. Once vibrant rural communities are facing abandoned storefronts, houses in disrepair, signs of economic distress. And then, of course, we’ve got the rest of the economy to worry about right here in Lockport. Roughly 3,000 workers and their families have been affected by the bankruptcy at Delphi, although I was breathing a big sigh of relief when the CEO of Delphi called to say that our two Delphi plants in New York were going to be kept open, the one here in Lockport and the other in Rochester. I’ve got no illusions about how hard it’s going to be to maintain employment and to keep a decent standard of living for the hardworking people who are employed at Delphi.

So much hinges on finding good jobs. I hear it all the time. I especially hear it because young people who want to stay in this beautiful environment, like Greg and Tanya, have their own families and stake their own futures here, are finding it harder and harder to do that. Our rural areas in New York have lost about 6.5 percent of our population in the last twenty five years. But when we turn to see, “okay, what can we do to have a better, organized response to help people stay on the farm, help people stay and grow their families and their jobs and their businesses in rural America?” we’re offered policies that are a day late, dollar short, and often miles off the mark.

First, the deck is stacked against rural and small-town America. The most recent Consolidated Federal Funds Report shows that when you look at the funding going to rural and small-towns based on population, there is an annual shortfall worth billions. And rural America is funded differently. 71 percent of the funds coming into rural America are payments – they’re called transfer payments: it’s Medicare, Social Security and farm subsidies rather than funds that can be used for community development and to improve capacity and help communities with transportation, communication, and so much else. Now by contrast, less than half the funds – about 48 percent – going to urban areas are what are called ‘transfer payments.’ Rural America needs help that will help the entire community.

Second, the policies are not geared toward helping rural America grow. Consider the farm bill; the top 10 percent of producers grab 70 percent of the payments. I think that’s not only wrong, I think that’s shortsighted. It isn’t smart. And despite the agricultural and economic changes occurring in rural America, the last farm bill spent less than one-percent on non-farm rural development.

Third, the misplaced priorities of the current administration and its allies in Congress have left rural areas and small towns to fend for themselves, for example, by continuing to support tax breaks for big oil companies that are making more money than anybody ever thought possible. Instead, why don’t we put that into lowering energy costs for American farmers? Why don’t we put that into homegrown fuels like ethanol, not just from corn but from soybeans, from cellulosic, from fast-growing willow trees, a lot of the things we’re now experimenting with? And, when it comes to the minimum wage, which is really crucial to rural America because so many workers are at the minimum wage – minimum wage workers – and I’m talking about people who get up and go to work every day, haven’t been raised since 1997. And Congressional salaries have gone up more than $30,000 at the same time. I don’t think we should have any more congressional pay raises until, number one, the minimum wage is raised, but number two, until average wages start going up because the last five years Americans have been treading water. Profits are up, productivity is up, but wages are not up. And we’re not investing in infrastructure, roads and bridges, and so much of what really made our country successful like going back to the Erie Canal or the Thruway. So the bottom line is that we need to do a better job with rural development and there’s a lot we can do. There’s so much that I think is possible and that’s what I want to turn to.

Now, we have three big questions to answer as a nation. How do we grow our economy in a more competitive world? We’re no longer just competing with somebody down the road, somebody across state borders; we’re competing worldwide. Number two, how do we protect our communities in a more dangerous world? You know, all we have to do is turn on the news to see that we’re living in a dangerous time and unfortunately we’re in a real struggle for the future against people whose values and beliefs are so different from ours. And finally, how do we defend our values in a rapidly changing world? Well, here at Robinson Farm I think we can address each of those because a lot of the answers for what we need to do as a country I think can be found in rural New York and rural America. I guess you could call this “Clinton’s Pitch” and that’s what I’m going to try to throw at you for the rest of my remarks.

Let’s start with thinking about how we would invest in renewable energy or invest in expanding broadband technology and opening up access to capital. We can foster innovation and growth. We can strengthen our agricultural sector. We can improve healthcare and expand educational opportunities and revitalize Main Street in small towns, in rural areas. I think we’ve got to start by paying attention to what’s going on in rural America and to make the American Dream real in our rural communities.

Let’s begin by recognizing the incredible opportunity that rural America has in renewable energy. Just a few weeks ago – I started a group called New Jobs for New York – we held a conference over in Rochester as to how we can make New York the center for renewable energy. And I’ve given speeches and I’ve written legislation and I’ve talked about how we can cut our dependence on foreign oil in 20 years and how we can expedite the development of renewables like biofuel and biodiesel. If we do that it’ll be good for the economy, it’ll be good for the farm economy, it’ll be good for the environment, it’ll be good for our security.

We all know what’s happening to gas prices and here on the farm I don’t need to tell you that it’s an increase in cost that’s going to be hard for some people to manage. You know we’ve got prices going through the roof –the average price for gas is now $3.13 a gallon in New York but there’s no end in sight. New Yorkers will, by the end of this year, pay about $10 billion more in gas prices than they paid just five years ago. And the money is not going to make us stronger and cut prices – that’s what bothers me. So why not redirect the money paid at the pump, away from the oil companies, away from the foreign governments, many of whom we are subsidizing – they’re use petrol-dollars to subsidize terrorists who are plotting against us. So it’s not only good for our economy, it’s good for our security. And if we do that we can begin to build a homegrown fuel industry.

Now this year we’re making about 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol in the U.S. That’s almost exclusively from corn in the Midwest. You know, I’ve spoken out against just relying on corn in the Midwest because I want New York farmers, I want farmers around the country to participate in this, but it’s going to take two things. It’s going to take building production facilities and we’re starting to do that. Buffalo News reported that there’s a new plan to build a storage and distribution center that will take products grown locally here in western New York and turn it into fuel. I know there’s a plant going in in Fulton which will be the biggest plant in the East Coast once that gets up and going in an old brewery. So let’s make sure that we’re growing the kinds of crops that we need to use to make biofuels. It’s starting to happen here in New York. The brewery project over in Fulton is going to provide 100 permanent jobs and indirectly support another 1000 in central New York.

We need to do more on other kinds of biofuels. I’m working with SUNY ESF over in Syracuse. Because if we create a government structure that instead of subsidizing oil companies subsidizes farmers and producers for ethanol we will revolutionize how we do fuel and will lower the cost because we won’t be dependant upon foreign oil. And it’s particularly important for us here in New York because I proposed a Strategic Energy Fund. That Strategic Energy Fund if it invested in what’s called cellulosic ethanol – you can use farm waste, you can use all kinds of things in order to do that. And it’s no longer a pipe dream. And why is it? Because the market is going to demand that we do it or else we’re going to lower our standard of living. We cannot continue to pay these high prices that I know are going to keep going up because of the way the market works.

But making more ethanol is only part of the equation. You know rural New York can also benefit from producing renewable electricity as well. We’ve got a big wind farm going up over by Lowville. I went over there, talked to the people over there. The farmers who are renting their land, they’re going to make thousands of dollars in annual payments for renting their land for the wind turbines. And they’re going to also get the energy so that it’s a win-win for them.

We need to look at wind, we need to look at solar. Solar’s getting cheaper. We could have a lot of use of solar on farms. Again it’s no longer pie in the sky. We have much smaller photovoltaic cells that they could be used.

In fact, I just read about a farm that just turned itself into a solar farm. What do I mean by that? Cleared out the crops and put in literally a crop of solar photovoltaic cells, selling the energy to the grid, running the entire operation right there locally.

Well, we need to think creatively about how we’re going to do that. I think if we have what’s called a Renewable Portfolio Standard to require that 20 percent of our electricity is produced from wind, and solar, and biofuels and other kinds of renewals by 2020, we would jump-start this. And it’s a goal that a lot of people are looking at seriously now and realizing that if we don’t do it we’re going to be putting our farmers, our small businesses, our consumers, our drivers, into a deeper and deeper economic hole.

Another big step we need to take is advancing and expanding access to broadband. I talked about this when I was running back in ‘99 and 2000. I think the first time I was here was a ‘99 meeting with a lot of farmers and small business people. You know, we have to compete globally now; it’s not enough just to compete locally. With broadband connectivity, rural America can take part in tele-work, distance learning, in healthcare, getting the best and the latest in healthcare information without having to drive anywhere. The Internet and new technology have changed the way we have to do business. And I think we can do more to enhance this if we accelerated the deployment of broadband-related equipment and provided tax incentives for companies to build networks in rural areas.

Here’s the problem. If population is dispersed you’re not living on top of each other, you’re not living vertically, not living right next to each other, it doesn’t pay for a lot of these companies in their minds to come in and do broadband, so a lot of rural America is just being left off, you know, the broadband grid. And I have legislation to provide tax incentives that passed the Senate, didn’t get through the House but I’m not going to give up on that because I think it is absolutely essential.

We have to fund the Rural Utilities Service and make sure the money goes to where it was intended. Congressman John McHugh and I – he’s the Republican Congressman from up in the North Country – he and I wrote a hot letter to the USDA because we have this program called Rural Utilities Service – it used to be for electricity, now we wanted it to be for broadband. They agreed. You know what they were funding? They were funding developments. You know, developers would come in and get access to that money. That was not the intention. So we’ve been pushing hard because America’s falling behind.

You know, in 2000 we were number one in the world in terms of broadband access, now we’ve dropped to 16th. And I believe in markets, but I don’t believe in markets with just blind faith. You know if the market’s not working, the big companies aren’t coming, then we’ve got to incentivize it the same way we did with rural cooperative programs back in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s to make sure the entire country was electrified.

You know that’s what we’ve done at every point in American history. Where the market can’t get the full distance, mostly for economic reasons, they don’t think it pays off at this time to do it. Well it was like Abraham Lincoln – President Lincoln decided to expand the transcontinental railroad; President Roosevelt did rural electrification, and President Eisenhower did the National Highway System. So we need to be smart about how we’re going to get broadband everywhere.

Now I’ve been working, since we don’t have a federal policy right now, I’ve been working locally, and I’ve been working with a group of bipartisan elected officials and business leaders. I helped to extend broadband infrastructure from Syracuse to Watertown to Massena, and we just secured federal funds to plan the extension to Plattsburgh. So we’re kind of doing it on our own, there’s no program to go to, we’re trying to piece the money together.

I held a conference in Canandaigua about three years ago to talk about expanding broadband and as a result Ontario County is developing a county-wide broadband plan. But we’ve got to have a national broadband plan because the programs are too complicated, they’re difficult to apply for, they’re scattered around the federal government – five different agencies. And I’m proposing a new Rural Broadband Initiative, and introducing legislation to focus on the 25% of our population who live outside urban areas, and are being left out of the information age economy.

My legislation would establish a single office, run by an administrator who could be held accountable for making sure that we get broadband out into rural areas to create a one-stop shopping clearing house so that the people who are trying to do this locally, like the folks I’ve been working with up in the North Country or Canandaigua, would know where to go. And I think we should create a Rural Broadband Advisory Panel because we need a National Rural Broadband Innovation Fund.

You know there’s new technologies coming online. We’ve got broadband possibly being able to be delivered by power lines. One thing we’ve got in Niagara Country is a lot of power lines. If we could deliver broadband over the power lines that would save a whole lot of money and get it to people much faster. Broadband might be able to be delivered by satellites. So we need continuing research and be creative about how we get this into the rural areas. So I think we ought to give some money to the National Science Foundation to tell us how we can research delivering the best telecommunications system to rural and other remote areas.

Now a perfect example of what we can do if we have it is the creation of small business rural trading cooperatives. You know, I was sitting around talking to my staff about five years ago, trying to figure out how do we create a market for a lot of our small businesses in rural areas. You know a lot of them don’t have business year round, you know especially in some of the areas like the Adirondacks, or the Finger Lakes. And we decided that we could go back to an old model but with a new twist. Co-ops are something that farmers are familiar with from the past. Well, why couldn’t we do a modern co-op that would help small businesses get on eBay and sell their products through eBay? That way they’d have the world as a market. So that’s what we’ve done, and we’ve been making real progress on that. I also thought we needed to give small towns more access to wireless internet, so we worked to bring in Microsoft and other companies and in Delhi, New York we linked up the whole town. I think we can do more of this but we’ve got to be creative about it.

You know, with the eBay trading cooperatives we’ve got companies that are adding employment, they’re expanding their businesses. I’ll give you two quick examples. One was a young man who made beautiful fishing rods, fly fishing rods. And he made maybe one every two weeks, because it’s very precision kind of work, plus supplies, and he sold about one every two weeks. We got him into the eBay trading cooperative put his products on eBay. Now he’s got contracts in Vietnam and Norway, places he’s told me he’d never heard of before. So he’s added employment, he’s selling fishing rods and flies all over the world. Another woman makes soap. Her husband’s a farmer and she makes soap, and she’s sold soap just kind of as a hobby, but she does really good work. So she decided that she wanted to try to expand so she went on E-bay and someone working on Oprah found her soap so she called up and put in an order for $40,000 worth of soap so she had to go out and get every person she ever knew to try to help her make soap for a week to fill the order.

There are things out there that we can take advantage of in a beautiful place like we are right now in Lockport, in Niagara County, if we get into the global market place. But in order to do that we need access to capital for rural businesses.

You know banks are merging, they’re getting bigger and bigger, they’re getting further and further away from the customer in many, many communities. And private sector transactions are often too high for rural Americans. I was at a meeting down in Central New York and some of the farmers were telling me that they wanted to transition, they were dairy farmers, they wanted to transition to organic, because they could get guaranteed contracts from the organic producers. But they couldn’t get their farmers to give them the investment money they needed to make the transition because it’s about a three-year process. So there’s just a lot of problems that we’re having because as farmers try to go to get capital, oftentimes, someone told me, that I’ve been banking the same place for thirty years, the bank gets taken over, I walk in, I don’t know anybody there anymore.

So we’ve got to figure out how we get access to capital. And I think one way to do that is to go to more nontraditional sources. Go to credit unions. Go to organizations like Rural Opportunities, Inc. Try to create different lines of credit and different ways of funding rural New York.

We also need access to micro loans. 20 percent of all of New York’s employees in the whole state are employed in businesses with five or fewer workers. And in certain places in the state it’s even higher, like in Yates County it’s 33.7 percent, so more than a third of the workers are in really small businesses. So I helped create something called ABC, it’s called Access to Business Capital. We started in Yates County where we could try to create some mechanism for connecting entrepreneurs with business training to people who need it, help, in order to get them small loans to grow their businesses. But we need to do this more at the federal level. And one thing that’s proven successful in urban areas is something called the New Markets Tax Credit. We need to make that available and simpler for use in rural areas. And we need to make sure that we’ve got incentives for people to stay and work in rural communities, including school loan forgiveness, rural tax credits for home purchases and business start-ups, government backed rural savings and investment accounts, because I personally think it’s important for our country to keep our rural areas populated, for obvious reasons for those of you who live here and understand why.

We also have to look at how we have a more coordinated approach toward rural development. A recent report by the Rural Vision Project, sponsored by Cornell University, said that we need to cooperate more within counties and across counties, because there’s a lot going on in Niagara County that maybe someone in Ontario County, or maybe someone in Oneida County, or maybe someone in Broome County doesn’t know about and visa versa. And how do we learn from each other, share information, and build these partnerships. One example I’ve worked on is a regional trade organization, called CNY Med-Tech, that stands for Central New York Med Tech. Because there are lots of little companies in central New York, from Syracuse to Skaneateles over to Rochester who were doing work in medical technology but they didn’t know each other was doing it. I was talking to one of the bigger companies there and they said, we can’t find anybody who makes this precision instrument we need so we’re going to China. I said, well why don’t you look around Central New York first. Well, they did, and they found a company in Auburn, but they never knew it, until they looked for it.

So I think we need to create regional networks that can help businesses, whether it’s networks in organic or the dairy industry, to specialty crops to wood products industry and so much else. I think we need a rural regional investment program here in the state to try to look and see how we can get people to find opportunities that they might otherwise miss. That’s happened in other parts of the country. You’ve got the Appalachian region, the Lower Mississippi Delta region, the Northern Great Plains region. Those are Federal programs that spend your tax dollars trying to help farmers and small businesses in those regions get better economic opportunity.

In fact, I work with the Appalachian Regional Commission because there are 14 New York counties. Bobby Kennedy, when he was Senator, made sure that 14 New York counties went into the Appalachian Regional Commission. So, we go around and we give grants to libraries and schools to bring technology. We go to health care facilities and I think we need to expand that because we have a lot of rural areas in our state that are left out, but could benefit from that kind of help.

We also need partnerships to revitalize Main Streets and downtowns. I’ve worked with a lot of communities around the state. I say to them, come to me with a project and I’ll try to help you. I’m not going to tell you because it’s your decision. The local people have to drive this, but come and tell me what you want. So, for example, a few years ago, people from Hornell came to see me. They had an old train depot. They wanted to turn it into a business headquarters. So, they needed some help to be able to do that and it was one of the ways they were able to persuade their biggest employer not to pick up stakes and move. I’m working with communities like Plattsburgh and Gloversville because they have old theatres that they’re trying to rehabilitate to bring people back and to create businesses that will support that. We’ve seen it happen very successfully in Schenectady, which went way down when GE pulled out. And in Seneca Falls, I’ve been working for the last five years to help create a real tourist attraction around the Women’s Hall of Fame. So, finally, we’re going to break ground on an old mill that’s there and turn it into a tourist attraction, kind of like the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, bring people, bring tourism.

I am convinced that heritage tourism, nostalgia tourism, eco-tourism can create jobs and bring money back home to rural areas in New York. The best example of how it’s worked amazingly well is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I don’t know how many of you have ever been down to Lancaster, PA. But, in Lancaster County, they have Amish farmers. They have small towns. About fifty years ago they decided they couldn’t attract big employers because they were rural – they were mostly farmland. So they said, what did we have? They said, we’ve got some of the most beautiful farmland and we’ve got Amish farmers. Let’s create ourselves as a tourist attraction. Sure enough, they did. And, decades later, that tourism industry in Lancaster County makes a billion dollars a year. And it didn’t alter the basic makeup of the county. It still is a farming county, but people make money off of restaurants and beds-and-breakfasts and putting people up in farms so people can come out and say, “look there’s a cow” and feel good about it and all that.

That reminds me, when I first got to the Senate, I was talking a lot about agriculture. A couple of my colleagues who were from Midwestern states said, ‘oh, come on you don’t have any farms in New York.’ I gave a speech on the floor of the Senate and I had a picture of a cow. I said, ‘this is the cow and the cow lives on a farm in New York.’ And they came up to me afterward and said, ‘oh, so you have one cow on one farm, right?’ But, because we have beautiful farmland, because we have open space, because we have this rolling terrain that is so attractive, I think we’re missing a bet in not figuring out how to turn that into more of a tourist attraction. The Wine Trail is doing that in Niagara and that’s something I’m very proud of.

But when we look at agriculture, yes as important as renewable energy is, regional partnerships, access to capital – we’ve got to do more to stand with family farmers. Farmers are facing increasing consolidation and vertical integration of the agricultural industry; inadequate supply of farm labor; a staggering federal deficit that affects our nation’s ability to fund conservation and help you with environmental requirements. We’ve got international trade pressures. We’ve got unprecedented natural disasters. We’ve got a lot of challenges on our plate. Just this past month, I was down in the Southern Tier up to the Mohawk Valley because dairy farmers along the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Mohawk are being just hit really hard by the recent flooding. So, there’s a lot going on.

How do we help create a more reliable safety net to manage risk in trying times, and in the event of natural disasters? Well, we have to do a better job. The safety net for our dairy farmers includes the Milk Income Loss Program and other counter-cyclical programs, so that farmers can get a fair price for their product. The safety net also needs to include crop insurance programs that provide better coverage and more flexibility and take into account the needs of specialty crops, like this farm produces or organic producers. Farmers also need reliable access to disaster assistance, which includes creating indemnity programs, where appropriate, to cover the losses of individual producers.

And we need to get serious and fund initiatives like the Emergency Conservation Program and the Emergency Watershed Program, which will help farmers in communities rebuild infrastructure after a disaster. I think it’s important that we point out that a lot of regulations are being put on farmers that they don’t have the means to manage. If we’re going to expect farmers to be the stewards of our land and take care of it, then we should have a better system of helping to fund that. It’s important that we have conservation programs because farmers, as you know so well, are the stewards of our land. According to the American Farmland Trust, farmers produce $35 billion a year in environmental benefits related to water quality, $153 billion a year in benefits related to biodiversity of plants and animals. For two decades, USDA focused conservation funds on land retirement, but we need to give help to working farmlands. That was the whole idea behind the 2002 Farm Bill. But, unfortunately, it’s never been funded.

So, we need to fund and strengthen current conservation programs and we should explore new ways to encourage conservation, such as a green payment program that would be voluntary, available to all who wish to participate, and provide payments based on environmental performance. That’s going to help everybody. With the right investments and priorities, we can promote resource conservation and environmental stewardship. We’ve had a great history in New York of preserving farmland. The first ever farmland preservation program was in Suffolk County. A lot of people don’t know that Suffolk County, way out there on Long Island, still has the highest value of farm produce in the whole state. They were desperately trying to save farmland.

So we need new ways of trying think about how to do this. We also need new markets to market the fruits of your labor.

Time and again farmers tell me they need a better distribution system to reach the marketplace. I’ve created this program called Farm to Fork to work with New York farmers and restaurants and schools and colleges and other big buyers of farm products, and particularly to promote connections between New York City and upstate farmers. We’ve been experimenting with it, and we’ve gotten a lot of people’s products into New York City. And we need to expand that. I’ve created a new partnership with Foodlink, which is a regional food bank that serves ten counties around Rochester. They’ve launched a program, because they used to take excess food out into these ten counties. They’d take them to nursing homes, and day care centers, and domestic abuse shelters; lots of places where they needed excess commodities. Then, they would drive back empty. So we said, why don’t you drive back in with farmers’ produce because they had a refrigerated warehouse to keep things fresh. And then, let’s see if we can create some buying relationships with Wegman’s and Top’s, and other supermarkets. That’s what we’ve been doing.

So, we’re making progress in creating a better distribution system. I think we can do even more. I’ve sponsored a meeting with the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities and the Culinary Institute of America to say, look, buy locally. You know, buy from the Robinson Farm. As long as they can provide to you, do that. And many of the other farms here could be selling into our colleges and universities. We have sixteen in the Buffalo area alone. So we’re going to be continuing to work on that.

We need to really play up what we do well and that’s why working with Margo Sue Bittner to use grants to turn an old convent into Marjim Manor is something that I feel really strongly about because once we got the Niagara Escarpment as an American Vita cultural Area, we need to make sure we bring people here to enjoy it, increase the tourism, bring people from both sides of the border. I’ve tried that in the Finger Lakes and it’s worked well. We’ve brought about 50 people from New York City, now they’re buying wines from the Finger Lakes.

And we need to seek out value-added opportunities. My office has worked with Champlain Valley Specialty, up along Lake Champlain. They’re taking New York apples, they’re cutting those apples into slices, they’re putting them in packages, and they’re selling them as snacks in schools. We just got a lot of positive feedback. The New York City school system, the largest in the country, is now buying these snacks – these fresh, vacuum-packed apple slices. There are a lot of examples of how we can get a better distribution market and create more opportunities that I can continue to work with you on as we move forward.

But we also need to make sure we don’t lose our export markets. Since 1996, the agricultural trade surplus we used to have has shrunk in just ten years from $27.3 billion to $10.5 million. U.S. agricultural exports are still rising, but imports are increasing nearly twice as fast. I will continue to fight for mandatory country of origin labeling. I don’t think it’s fair that the consumer who might want to know that these are New York apples won’t be told they’re New York apples, and may buy Chinese apples. If they want to buy Chinese apples, fine. But let’s make sure they know they have a choice for New York apples.

I will be introducing legislation to require the International Trade Commission to report to Congress on the actual effects of every trade agreement we sign—the good, the bad and the ugly. Because I know talking with apple producers in Niagara County, dairy farmers over in Clinton County on the opposite side of the state, it’s very difficult to get your products into Canada. If you can’t get into Canada, how do you expect to get into some other, faraway country? And we have a trade agreement with Canada. They come up with every excuse in the world to keep our apples, and our fruits, and our vegetables, and our dairy products out of Canada. And they need to be challenged on that. I’m going to make sure that we get the information to challenge them because I don’t think we should be letting people just steal our market. If we can’t compete, shame on us, but we shouldn’t let people take our market away from us.

Of course, we’ve got to do something about agricultural labor. I saw Don’s interview, I’m afraid I might have made him a little famous here, but he did an interview and he said, look, we need labor. We had a bi-partisan agreement on one part of the immigration reform. Didn’t agree on nearly anything else, but we all agreed on what we called, AgJobs. We had 68, 69 Senators, both sides of the aisle, to create a system that would streamline what needed to be done to get workers to come up here to help harvest crops. We can’t get it through the Congress. It’s being held hostage by the bigger debate about immigration. My point is, let’s get agriculture taken care of, then we can argue about everything else. But let’s have a system that doesn’t put people at risk because they don’t know how to follow it, they’re second guessed, they can’t rely on the sources of the labor. And let’s create a decent farm worker program once again to get people to do jobs that need to be done in America.

Finally, we’ve got to something about health care and education in rural areas, if we expect people to stay to raise their families. Certainly when it comes to health care it is so important that we get broadband connectivity, that we get health information technology, so rural areas will have access to telemedicine. I’m working to get the bill that I introduced through the Congress to try to help us get set up to do that. But I’m also going to be introducing a Rural Workforce Bill to recruit and keep more health care professionals in rural and small town communities.

We need a system for loan forgiveness. When somebody comes out of medical school or nursing school with thousands of dollars of debt, let’s help forgive that debt if they will come to a rural community and serve the people who live there. That used to be what we did back in the 1960s and then it got cut out. We need to reinstate it. We need to have tuition assistance, so people who want to go to medical school or nursing school.

We need to do more to make sure that we have the health care professionals we need. We also need to make sure that our schools have access to the technology that they need. Our rural schools have transportation problems. It’s getting more expensive. I’ve already been approached by some school districts who tell me they’re not going to be able to run all their buses on all their routes because they didn’t budget enough for gas prices. This is going to be a big problem as we move forward. So we need to make sure that we’ve got all the technology. We’ve got other means of getting the costs down. Buff State has a great program where they work on rural education. They did a program to help middle school math teachers in rural parts of western New York get some new online resources. That’s what we need because we can attract and keep people in teaching if they feel like they’re part of the world, not cut off from resources that can help them do the job they need for their students.

We also need to make it easier and cheaper for hard-working families to send their kids to college. It is getting so expensive; it is now more expensive than it was twenty five years ago. College tuition has gone up every year for the last twenty five years. So I think we need to give families tax credits that are what’s called refundable. Even if your income’s low, you get the money back because you’re trying to give a better life to yourself or to your child.

I think we need to focus on what are called non-traditional students. There are a lot of people who didn’t go to college the first time around. Now they want to go and get some kind of degree, or they’re in some kind of profession where they need some additional training. Well let’s give them some help too. College is no longer just for 18 year olds; you can go to college anytime, to improve your skills and to have a better future for yourself.

So, there’s a lot to do. I don’t think the frost is here yet but it’s creeping in.

But when I campaigned for the Senate I traveled all 62 counties and as your Senator I worked hard to spend time in all 62 counties, and it has been a joy and a privilege. I’ve met with lots of people in so many different settings around our state. I’ve seen the frustration, particularly in our rural areas and our small towns, about how we’re going to sustain the way of life and the standard of living. I believe that the values that are at the core of rural life—hard work and responsibility and community, are really key to whether our state and our country will be successful in the future.

So we have a great opportunity now. Just as all those people all those years ago who built that canal, we can build a new rural future. We can have the right priorities. We can roll up our sleeves. We can get to work. We can create a new rural development agenda for our country. We can bring back Main Streets. We can keep people, particularly young people, here. And with your help and with your ideas, we can start right here in New York. Thank you all very much.

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