Tuberville Supports American Farmers

WASHINGTON - This week, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) spoke on the Senate Floor in support of American farmers, who are the lifeblood of the United States. In his speech, Sen. Tuberville addresses his concerns about the mass outsourcing our country is doing with food production, as well as the dangers our country is facing with our foreign adversaries buying hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland nationwide.

Read the speech below or watch on YouTube and Rumble.

"Thank you, Mr. President. I'm back, again, talking about something that is very, very important to everybody in the United States with America. There should be alarms going off about what's happening. I know we are we have a lot of bad things happening all over the world. We're in conflicts. We're in situations where we're trying to control our own destiny when we're not getting a lot of help from a lot of people that we should be counting on. Well, let's talk about the United States of America for a second. Let's talk about our farmers. Our farmers are in trouble. We better wake up and smell the roses, because what's happening in this country should be a crime.

We have lost, just in the last few years, 150,000 farms and over 25,000 farmers. […] And we take pride in what we do in this country. We do everything as First-class as we possibly can. And we're running people out of business right and left, and it's getting worse. Nobody's listening. Nobody's out there pounding on all of our doors saying, 'we need help' other than the ones right now that are in desperate and dire need. Again, we have a lot of problems. But you'd think we have problems. We start and continue to lose these farmers that we have in this country, and we continue to eat to trash that is sent in from these foreign countries. We're gonna have many, many more problems.

It's a big deal because there's not one state in this country that doesn't deal in farming in some capacity. Not one state. We're all involved in it. We all have skin in the game. Agriculture is the backbone of who we are. And what we are. And if we're gonna continue to be the place that everybody wants to move to, to be a part of, and not a third world country, like a lot of these places that we're allowing to ship food into, and from, we'd better wake up. Now for some reason, the past administration either didn't understand the importance of agriculture or our farmers or put it bluntly. They really didn't give it down about it, to be honest with you. Instead, they were focused on outsourcing our food, our lumber, or fish, anything to do with farming or agriculture. We, for some reason, we're turning over everything to people outside our country.

And the people of the cream of the crop that are true Americans in this country are people in agriculture. You would think that we would learn the thing or two back during COVID. I can remember standing up here early part of COVID back in What was it 2020? And talking about how in the world have we allowed this country to outsource everything that we do medically? Because when we looked up and COVID was rampant, we're looking around for masks. We're looking around for drugs. We're looking around for things to save people's lives. And guess what? We don't make any of that stuff anymore. We outsourced it all. Now we're doing the same thing to farmers. You know, it's very dangerous to be reliant on countries like China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Brazil, all these people that are either socialist or communist countries, we can't continue to do this. We can't do it.

We built this country on hard work and effort and not by handouts and not by cheap things that we buy to keep this country going such as what's coming from China or some of these third world countries. One thing that we need to be doing to help our farmers is we need to be tariffing the heck out of these countries that are sending in food that's taken over our grocery stores, and our restaurants that they say is great food. It is reliable. It is best in the world when it is nothing but trash. That's all it is. It's total trash.

And for some reason, because we think that the price is a little bit better, we're getting involved in that in terms of our grocery stores and our restaurants and we're serving things that we shouldn't be serving and is causing a lot more problems. You know, we've got the best food safety programs and standards in this country by far. We got to know where it was raised. We have to know what didn't spray on the food or where the fish was caught, all the things that go along with food safety, go along with farming.

You know, the past few decades, the beef packing industry has shrunk to the point that there's only a few plants processing the majority of our nation's cattle a day, and that is beyond stupid. Really, it is. Think of what we've done. We have outsourced most of our food processing, especially when it comes to beef, to these gigantic processing companies that, by the way, are owned, two of them, by foreign entities. President Trump did an executive order to try to get to the bottom of what these foreign owned meatpacking companies were doing because their prices were going so high. They were price fixing.

And what do you think is gonna happen when you run into a situation where you allow people to control the market? These foreign entities are controlling America's meat supply at the expense of American farmers, and their families, people that work hard like all of us in this country. Not to mention that the consolidation of these few processors has threatened Americans' food supply. In 1980, these foreign processors control about 36% of the beef market.

Now, today, these processing plants, two which are foreign controlled, 85% of the United States beef processing market. And we're asking for huge problems. I'm not a mathematician, but I know that those numbers that American owned small meat processors have been pushed out of business. And that's what they've done. That's how they do it. They try to control everything. So, they put in these 4 meat packing processing plants across this country, they control it all and the little guy's gone. And this country was built on small businesses, small farms, everything that produced good product for United States citizens That's how we were that's how we were raised.

That's how we were brought up. We need to open up competition and find ways to support American meat processing plants. We've got to do it. That's the job of our agriculture department. They have started working on that, started trying to open up more, see what we can do, but we cannot continue to allow four meat packing processing plants control everything that we do when it comes to beef. When I was growing up, it was common to see, 'Made in America' labels on everything in the store. Made in America. We're all proud of it. Now it's rare.

Most of the labels we see are 'Made in China' or 'Made in India.' I want to challenge everybody to when you go in the store you think that this product is made in America. All you have to do is look at the box or the can or whatever. You'll be very, very surprised where that product is made. And most of the time, it's not gonna be made in the good old USA. And it's hurting our American farmers. It is hurting us bad. They can put a name on it. They can put a label on it. But that doesn't mean a hill of beans. Unless it says 'Made in America', we're selling our country out. We're selling our farmers out. People that have built this country.

In addition to growing our own food and producing our own medicine, we need to be using our own cotton. Our cotton farmers are broke. They've had 3 bad years, and it's getting worse and worse every year. Now, this is planting season. They're putting all the cotton in the ground. […] They've got all these people out there working these $100,000 tractors and machines that they use to plant this cotton. And if you look at it at the end of the day, the cost of putting this cotton in the ground is far and above the amount of money that they'll receive when they sell this cotton. […]

We've allowed foreign countries to do everything they possibly can to outgrow and do things at a rate faster than us, and then we're allowing all this cotton to come in from other countries. Brazil is one. And again, if we continue to allow Brazil without tariffing these people and let them know, hey, you're gonna send your cotton in here. We're gonna have a tough time, and we're gonna lose our farmers. So, we're gonna start tariffing your cotton and put a price tag on it when it comes to this country. We do not owe Brazil one thing. Our farmers don't owe them anything. We owe our farmers in this country. In my state of Alabama, we're one of the top cotton producers in the country. We bring in more than $400 million of revenue every year to the State of Alabama.

Our stores are filled with shirts, jeans, towels, bedding. But the problem is, if you look on that tag, most of them are made overseas. Everything with cotton. We don't really use cotton in this country anymore unless it comes from overseas. American cotton farmers produce the highest quality of cotton in the world. But they're undercut by all this foreign junk that we're bringing in. So, there's a lot of work that goes into cotton production. And one thing about our cotton farmers, they work at it 365 days a year. They make the best product they possibly can. […]

My point here is that Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi and I are introducing a bill called Buying America Cotton Act. Now, here's the reason we're doing this. We have to save our cotton farmers. If we don't do it, in the next few years, it'll be over. They'll all be gone.

[…] When you buy something with cotton in it, that cotton is gonna come from a foreign entity. We have to do something to help, and there's a way to do it without costing a lot of money. There's a way to do it in this building. All we have to do is pass the Buying America Cotton Act to incentivize folks to buy American cotton and bolster our American cotton producers. Instead of arguing about bail outs when our cotton farmers go under, and they need help, of course, as the federal government, we try to help them out. But you can't help them out enough to where they can really survive a long period of time.

So, what we're wanna do is get away from the subsidy part and give them an opportunity […] to give tax credits when people buy American cotton. That's all we wanna do. When people buy American cotton, they get a tax credit for it. If you buy Brazilian cotton, you don't get a tax credit. We have to do something to help our farmers, especially these cotton farmers. When farm when farm income improves, everything else improves. The net program goes down, not to mention the additional economic activity that a strong rural economy will contribute to when you get this tax base done with farmers and making profit. Again, they hadn't made any profit going on 4 or 5 years.

Instead of spending money, we wanted to make sure that these farmers don't need a subsidy at the end of the year. If we give tax credits for farmers or to entities that buy American cotton, we will not have to pay subsidies anymore. This is this is an end all solution to helping the cotton farmers across this country. Cotton is not just for t- shirts and stuff either. Cotton is for medical supplies, military, critical materials that we use across this country. Cotton plays a key part in national security. A nation that cannot supply its own basic materials is a nation that has surrendered its independence. And so that's why I'm up here today. We're getting ready to celebrate our 250th anniversary, and our farmers have been a huge part of that for 250 years.

We grew our own food. We cut our own timber. We cut our own fish. We did everything possibly could. But what have we done? Corporations have run out the private sector in this country. The small business in the country. They moved it to corporations out of this country, and they put us in harm to way. They have really put us in harm to way. So, Buying American Cotton Act puts our farmers in a situation where we do not have to, as a governing entity, be able to have to bail them out every year when they loot when they lose money because they won't lose money. […]

So, let's help our cotton farmers. And one other thing I want to say about this. I've talked about this several times on the floor. And it's getting pretty serious. And it's something that, again, we look at it and say it's not gonna continue to happen. Just recently, we estimated that China has bought and owned as of today, 300,000 acres of American farmland. […] 300,000 acres that the Chinese own. Who is our biggest adversary? China.

And we're allowing them to buy American farmland in this country, and a lot of it is by our military bases. And I wonder why that happens. And I don't think we're stupid, but we're crazy if we continue to let this happen. It is an urgent and national crisis. And we gotta make sure that we keep our eye on this, and we understand there are some states that are going in telling China now that they cannot buy farmland because they run it through different entities and that's one thing that we need to make sure that at the end of the day that we keep eye on this.

But, I just wanna come up here today and let people know, our farmers are in the fourth quarter. And if we don't have a good year this year, we're going to have a serious, serious problem with our farmers going out of business. And when farmers go out of business, they are a big contributor to our country when it comes to tax base, buying things, producing things, and making our country much stronger.

So, Mr. President, I plead with people, please start understanding what's going on here because if we don't put a foot down and wait too long, and our farmers are gone, they sold their land. We have got a big problem ahead of us. And again, I think it's a huge national security threat. And when you're having to buy everything out of the country, again, we'll go back to one thing. Did we learn anything from COVID?

Evidently, we didn't. And next time we look up and you're going to have to buy everything that comes in from another country, especially when it comes from Ag, we got huge problems. Thank you, Mr. President."

Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans' Affairs, HELP and Aging Committees.

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