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Focus on farm policy, Klobuchar visits Bagley, Bemidji as part of tour of northern Minnesota (Bemidji Pioneer)

July 7, 2007

By Brad Swenson

BAGLEY — Tackling energy policy while failing to agree on immigration reform, Congress now moves to its next battle — writing the next five-year farm bill.

U.S. Amy Klobuchar, DFL-Minn., a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, took a host of farm questions Friday morning as she met with about 25 people at Granny B’s, a homey café on Bagley’s main street.

Part of a week-long tour through northern Minnesota, Klobuchar on Friday also toured the Veterans Administration Community-Based Outpatient Clinic set to open next week in Bemidji, and met with the “Bemidji Leads!” stewards group.

The U.S. House Agriculture Committee — chaired by Rep. Collin Peterson, DFL-7th District — is ahead of the Senate, with a draft farm bill at the ready. Klobuchar said her Senate panel plans to mark up, or put dollars to policy, later in July.

“My basic view, and Collin’s is, that we keep the safety net in place, so that we have a strong safety net for our farmers,” Klobuchar said, referring to price supports for crops and milk, subsidies used to even out peaks and valleys in the market.

And both want to see permanent disaster relief worked into the farm bill, instead of having to seek it through supplemental appropriations. Congress tried the last two years to pass a disaster relief bill, but hit a veto threat from President Bush. The recent Iraqi war supplemental bill did finally include $3.5 billion in aid.

“We also need better incentives in the energy title of the farm bill,” she said. “That could be key for the Bagley/Bemidji area, that we move on our strong corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel, and that we move into other forms of biomass that include residue from logging, switch grass and prairie grass that can be grown on more marginal farm land.”

While using this week to hit July 4th parades, Klobuchar also teamed up with Peterson in several northwestern Minnesota stops to talk farm bill with local people.

The two on Thursday toured Northern Excellence Seed processing plant in Williams. A $229,700 federal demonstration grant will fund a project to use biomass produced on two local farms and burned in a low-water use gasification system for producing syngas to generate electricity to power the seed plant.

“They’re taking the screenings from the grass seed and using that to fuel the energy for the plant,” Klobuchar said. “It’s an example of a small-scale project where we want to start creating incentives for people to be able to do that.”

She plans to be a leader in the Senate on pushing cellulostic ethanol, which could involve the Bemidji area with its available waste wood, she said.

To the group and in an interview, Klobuchar said the rural development title also needs a boost, but must compete for funding with the other titles, such as commodity subsidies. But she believes that can be done by stricter caps on commodity supports, moving the savings to rural development and renewable energy.

She said she’s a strong believer of “pay-go,” enacted by the new Democrat Congress that with proposed new programs, funding for them must also be attached.

But capping farm subsidies to farmers at $250,000 could provide money for other uses in the farm bill, and still minimally affect Minnesota farm operations. “We have a lot of small and medium sized farmers — we don’t have those big corporate conglomerate farms .”

Resistance, however, is expected to be stiff in the South, where commodities such as cotton and rice are expensive operations.

“There are always those fights,” Klobuchar said about the tug between farm bill titles, “but I think there is general agreement that we want to keep some money in rural development, and that we want to keep the basic structure of the last farm bill.”

For northwestern Minnesota, Klobuchar said the House bill does include and she expects the Senate bill to improve conditions for Red River Valley sugar beet farmers.

“The House bill has, what I like to see, a little bit of an increase in the loan rate, which is what they (sugar beet farmers) wanted,” she said. “It basically keeps the sugar program intact, with a bit of an increase in the loan rate.

“And there’s a concept that if there’s excess sugar coming in from Mexico and such places, that some of it could be used for ethanol,” the freshman Democrat said.

Klobuchar heard from people in Bagley about the need to preserve rural development funding under the farm bill, especially funding for rural water and wastewater treatment infrastructure and rural critical access hospitals. She also heard about revamping the federal crop insurance program to allow more current production figures to determine crop coverage.

Vets clinic

The opening next week of the VA outpatient clinic in Bemidji comes at a good time, Klobuchar said, as 2,600 Minnesota National Guard troops return home in a month from extended service in Iraq.

She toured the new facility, west on Fifth Street, which will take the pressure off travel to VA facilities in Fargo, St. Cloud or Minneapolis.

“One of the things about this war is that you have so many Guard and Reserve and they don’t have a base to come home to,” she said. “They are going back to their families all over our state, and it’s put a huge premium on having more clinics in greater Minnesota.”

National Guard and Reserve troops shouldn’t have to move just because they served in Iraq, she said. “When they signed up for this war, signed up for the Guard or Reserve, there was no waiting line. And there shouldn’t be a waiting line when they come home for health care.”

Klobuchar said that she “applauds Bemidji for having the foresight to have this clinic. There’s been a huge underestimation of the number of people from this administration that need health care.”

The administration in 2006 were off by 87,000 for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan needing VA health care, she said. The figure was four times less than that for the previous year.

“These women and guys are coming back with mental health problems and with all kinds of things — brain injuries and things we’ve never seen before,” she said.

Klobuchar has signed onto a number of bills affecting veterans health care and other provisions to aid returning soldiers. She supports efforts to increase funding for wounded veteran health care, allocating more than $5 billion in health care funds for returning troops and veterans.

“I have made that a real priority, because I think no matter where people are on the war, for or against it, there’s some agreement that we can’t treat these returning soldiers like they were treated after Vietnam,” Klobuchar said.

“Bemidji Leads!”

Klobuchar spent about an hour with 30 community leaders and others involved with “Bemidji Leads!,” the group of “stewards” who have drafted 17 “destiny drivers” to chart a future for the community.

They range from planting 10,000 trees a year, to building a regional events center, to getting a four-lane highway from Bemidji to the Twin Cities, to having students placed in the top five in the state in performance, and creating 200 living wage jobs a year for 10 years.

A number of the goals may need federal assistance, Klobuchar was told, such as developing the Bemidji Regional Airport into a regional economic engine, and ensuring higher rural public assistance reimbursements for health care so North Country Regional Hospital can become one of the top 100 hospitals in the nation.

Similarly, the farm bill’s rural development title seeks to do much of the same, such as funding critical access hospitals and providing for high technology like broadband Internet to rural areas. Even uniform cell phone coverage areas, she said.

“The ‘Bemidji Leads!’ project is just a great example of what one town is doing,” Klobuchar said.

Taking senior Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman’s advice, Klobuchar hopes to visit all 87 counties each year. In addition to the July Fourth break, she said she will travel through Minnesota during the August recess.

“It really grounds you,” she said. “It’s a huge mistake for the people who don’t come back a lot.”

http://www.bemidjipioneer.com/articles/rss.cfm?id=9775