SENATOR JIM JONES: Thank you for having this meeting here in Kearney, and I think it's a real good listening session that we've got set up. And I want to thank everybody that put it all together so we can have it so its location is close to my home, so that is great too.

But anyway, I'm a farmer and rancher. I live south of Broken Bow. I farm there but all my farm products goes through my own cattle, I feed them out. And right now this week I'm selling finished cattle on my own ranch. And it's tough to do because we only got two or three buyers. And, you know, you try to put that together, and they only buy for 15 minutes a week, and it's all over with until next week. And so it's a big issue in my area. And my area is practically all sandhills, and I've got 13 counties that I represent as a State Senator. So cattle is my business and besides being a State Senator, I'm trying to spend sometime down in Lincoln while I'm running a ranch back at home too. So it's quite a problem to do both and hopefully that we can get some corn trade going. I realize it's a tough issue, but I think we're going to have to keep working on it because we really need the foreign trade because if we don't have foreign trade in this country, we as agriculture--and I think Senator Chuck Hagel said that earlier--are really in bad shape.

And I think we really need to get that going to make that work because first of all, we've got sanctions on so many countries. If we can remove them sanctions, we've got NAFTA in place, and if we've got sanctions in foreign countries, we're kind of in a bad place. So what we need right now is a level playing field that we can work and hopefully make it work for all of us.

We need to move our grain. I raise a lot of grain on my ranch, but I run it all through my own cattle, so I don't sell grain. But we need to have $2.35 out of that grain to break even. Right now we're only getting about, well, I brought some into my cattle the other day at $2, so that's pretty tough to make it work.

And talk about cattle, I got a cow/calf operation, and it costs about $350 at the least to run a cow year around whether she brings back a live calf or dead calf; it don't matter because that's what it costs to run her the year around. And so we've got to take that into consideration. So with them comments, I just want to thank you for having us here today and hopefully that we can get something out of this when we get to Seattle. Thank you.