REPRESENTATIVE ROLAND CHICOINE: Thank you. Members of the committee, my name is State Representative Roland Chicoine from Elk Point, , and I'm -- my son that has taken over the farm now is the fifth generation of farming, and so I've been around a long time. And what I've -- we've seen a lot of farm crisis.

I remember my dad way back in the late '30s and early '40s, we had a severe farm crisis at that time. And it seems like we get a farm crisis coming at us just about every 10, 15 years we have a farm crisis. I remember in 1985 when we had a farm crisis of high interest rates. Our total body of legislators from South Dakota flew out to Washington to solve the problem, and I think we did some good out there at that time. Anyway, interest rates came down right after we were out there. So --

And we're in a farm crisis right now that I don't think we're ever going to see the end of it because it's so severe. And what is happening -- well, for instance, we got a lot of FFA people, high school kids around here and out in the hall. How many of you people know what FFA stands for? Future Farmers of America, and if we have this farm crisis the way we have it now, they're not going to be any future farmers of America down the road. And so we got to protect the whole program. And anybody and everybody who likes to eat, and we all do, you know, we got to have them three meals a day it seems like, and so everybody who likes to eat should be interested in a good farm program, because if we don't have a good farm program, we're going to be told by the corporate America what to eat and what we're going to have to pay for our food. And we don't want that to ever happen. We would like to keep the agriculture in the hands of people and because of right now we have cheap food, and everybody can buy it and plenty of it. And if we put everything in the hands of corporate America, that won't be the case anymore.

And so it's important that we -- we take a good hard look and can -- we can earn and learn by our past experience of what happened. And I'm sure if we all work and pull together, we can make sure that we have a good farm program and the -- we'll have farmers around for a long time and -- because we like to eat. The whole world likes to eat. And so that's what we got to do.

Thank you.