America’s family farmers, ranchers, and foresters are a highly diverse and constantly evolving group of more than 2.2 million entrepreneurs who differ greatly in the size of their operations, the products they produce, their enterprise structure, their needs for capital and financing, their use of farm labor, geographic location, environmental challenges, marketing decisions, and annual revenues derived from their agricultural operations. Fewer than 6% of U.S. farms today are large, commercial scale, farming-only businesses. These roughly 125,000 farms produce 75% of all domestic agricultural production. The remaining 94% of farms in the United States incorporate non-farm income as part of their business plan. The National Grange believes that federal farm programs should foster increased participation in the agricultural sector as well as the broadest practical distribution of agricultural production by actively encouraging more Americans to include farming or ranching as part of their entrepreneurial business or personal lifestyle goals. According to the 2007 Census of Agriculture, the majority of the farmers in our nation are over 57 years old and 35% of our farmers are over the age of 65. Farm policy must assure that today’s family farmers can retire with dignity and that their productive resources will be transferred to a new generation of farmers and rural entrepreneurs. Farm programs should reward innovative and sustainable practices, encourage sound conservation techniques, preserve prime agricultural land, assure compliance with existing international trade agreements, respond quickly to natural disasters, and facilitate the introduction of cost saving and environmentally beneficial new technologies for all segments of the agriculture sector. Finally, farm policy must protect farmers from risks that are beyond their control and from the undue concentration of market power that restricts competition or entry into the agriculture sector.

Today our nation faces the worst financial crisis in a generation. The financial crisis did not arise from the actions of businesses along the quiet main streets of rural America, but its impact is being felt disproportionately in farming and rural communities. Today, rural counties are losing jobs at a faster rate than urban or suburban counties. Especially hard hit are rural counties dependant on manufacturing and low wage services, like call centers. Even the few remaining farming dependant rural counties are experiencing a sharp and painful economic downturn after posting record net farm income in 2008.

Yet, throughout rural America, entrepreneurs and small businesses remain the primary engine of prosperity. A larger portion of jobs in rural areas are held by people who are self employed, or who work directly for someone who is self employed, than in urban or suburban communities. Immediate action by the federal government to revive the national economy by cushioning the impacts of widespread unemployment, creating new jobs through extensive investments in rural public works infrastructure programs, restoring confidence in the financial system, and protecting the American taxpayer should be the overriding priority of the President of the United States and the Congress. Further investigation and possible prosecution or civil action against individuals involved in the collapse of the banking and financial industry should also be vigorously pursued. Companies that engaged in greed, corruption, incompetence, or fraudulent business practices should not be rewarded with taxpayer bailouts. Strict limits must be placed on the amounts of compensation to executives of companies that receive bailouts. Indefinite, direct government ownership or control of private business must be avoided at all costs. All major corporations, especially banks and financial institutions, that are deemed “too big to fail” and that have fallen into receivership or direct government ownership should be quickly restructured, broken up into small competitive businesses, or processed through bankruptcy in order to return their productive assets to the private sector.

As the financial crisis has spilled into the personal credit, small business, farming sectors, and rural entrepreneurs who are unable to get credit (and who are largely ineligible for direct government “bailouts”) are forced to close operations and sell assets. With the looming possibilities of large scale personal and small business bankruptcies, immediate action should be taken to regulate and restructure small business lines of credit, home mortgages, home equity loans, and credit cards in order to require that loan terms are presented in easy to understand language. Variable interest rates should be restricted during the crisis to no more than five percent above the prime-lending rate.

In the long run, systematic reforms to the federal government’s fiscal policy are critical to ensuring a return to general prosperity, price stability, and an equitable distribution of our nation’s productive resources among all members of our society. Our nation cannot simply shift the unsustainable excess of credit, borrowing, speculation and financial leverage that occurred in the private sector (and that triggered this crisis) onto the public debt in order to artificially “stimulate” our economy indefinitely. Before the federal government can convince the American public that it will credibly provide meaningful oversight over the profligate business practices of private financial institutions in order to prevent a similar financial crisis from occurring in the future, our national political leaders must first lead by example by adopting concrete commitments to balance the federal budget within five years, further reduce the outstanding federal deficit, and address the burgeoning un-funded liabilities in our national social insurance safety net.