I cannot stand by and watch our family farmer's suffer - Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)

I've been watching the Farm Bill speeches on CSPAN2 since 3 o'clock this afternoon. I am nauseous. Talk about men without a clue.

Harkin was going on about the small farmer and the benefits of the Farmer's Market money included in this bloated bill. He painted a lovely picture of a family farmer having a free range flock of hens to sell their eggs at the farmer's market. I called his office pretty quick and left a message about how, under NAIS, there won't be many small farmers left.

It's all about HOPE, they keep saying, hope for the farmers and in spite of the fact that they keep using the family farmer as their example, they really mean Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

"They live out in the country alone; it's them against the odds," said Dorgan (D-ND). "If it isn't about the family farm, we wouldn't need this bill."

Cripes, they know nothing.

In the meantime, here's a good article about Secrecy in the Farm Bill, talking about the FOIA exemption.

Secrecy in Farm Bill

By Rebecca Carr | Monday, November 5, 2007, 02:50 PM

You might think that the massive farm bill now on the table has nothing to do with government secrecy, but it does.

OpenTheGovernment.org, an umbrella organization of conservative and liberal organizations, discovered a provision in the measure that would create an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for all records related to the Agriculture Department’s animal identification system.

The National Animal Identification System tracks sick animals through the system, among other things. It includes cows with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, commonly known as “mad cow,” disease.

Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, is lobbying against the provision because it would “create an unnecessary bar” to finding out about the condition of animals in the nation’s food supply and how they are handled in the system.

“With food safety concerns on the rise, it doesn’t make sense that the public can’t find out if an animal is sick,” McDermott said.

Read the rest of it here. And leave a comment, please.