Press Office of Hank Goodwin

[Hank Goodwin]

Press Office of Hank Goodwin

Proudly Representing the 4th District of Kansas

[/b][/i]

2441 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515

Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
[/center]

[Hank Goodwin]

The Comprehensive Agricultural Stability and Flexibility Assurance Act:

Good for Farmers, Good for America

Support for farmers:

• CASFAA provides full support for farmers while moving towards greater flexibility and more freedom in agriculture.
  
• Production Flexibility Contracts: Provide direct payments to farmers based on how much acreage they devote to their crops, not on their production. This rewards all Americans who choose to farm, while providing far greater flexibility as to what they plant than in the past.
  
• Nonrecourse Marketing Assistance Loans: Allow farmers the flexibility to choose when they will bring their crops to market.
  
• Emergency Deficiency Payments: Because farming can be unpredictable, this offers a way to make payments to save farms should any emergencies arise.
  
• Equitability: A hard cap of $300,000 on payments to any one farm, to assure that payments are spread evenly throughout American farms.
  

Enhancing Conservation and Technology:

• CASFAA extends and enhances several popular and succesful conservation and environmental programs, while also creating new programs to support agricultural education, provide high technology to farmers, and create an Agricultural Information Center to assure that America's farmers have access to the latest and most advanced agricultural information.
  
• Conservation Security Program: Extends this popular program, increasing its funding and the payment amounts for qualified farms.
  
• Environmental Quality Incentives Program: Extends this popular program, increasing its funding.
  
• Farmland Protection Program: Extends this popular pgram, increasing its funding.
  
• Agricultural Education Support: Provides a quarter of a billion dollars in new grants and scholarships to support agricultural education.
  
• Technological Improvement Grants: Provides grants to support farms purchasing high technology to assure America's farms are the most technologically advanced in the world.
  
• Agricultural Research and Information Center: Provides the latest information and research on agricultural practices, trade, economics, and law available to all farmers, with a particular focus on farmers in rural and low-income areas.

Supporting Trade and Trimming the Deficit:

• Provides support for farmers that falls under the limitations imposed by the World Trade Organization, assuring that free trade will continue to advance and that further markets will open to America's farmers.
  
• CASFAA accomplishes all of this while saving the budget 5.5 billion dollars.
  

CASFAA is the best policy for America's farmers.[/b][/i]