COLLEGE STATION — Short-term preoccupations have harmed the best agricultural production system in the world and the land-grant university system that supports it, but there is still cause for optimism, a Texas congressman says.
“It’s just a matter of time before we get ourselves on the right track,” said Charles Stenholm, a Democratic congressman from Texas’ 17th District, at the Southern Region Mini Land-Grant meeting at Texas A&M June 30.
“It’s been the secret of the land-grant system to take opportunities and work for successful conclusions and answers,” Stenholm said. “The team approach of extension and education seeing that the research gets out to where someone can use it is the envy of the world.”
However, difficulties do lie ahead, he warned. State agricultural universities and their affiliated research stations and Extension services must do more with less money because of a political climate that has allowed targeting of agriculture for cuts.
“We’re not cutting muscle any more; we’re into bone. We’re way past the fat and deep into bone,” Stenholm said. “If every function of the budget had been cut as much as agriculture, the budget would be balanced.”
“It’s going to be very important that all of us in this room spend a lot of time figuring out how to do more with less … extending public dollars with private dollars in every possible way that we can, listening to the stakeholders and facilitating mechanisms for stakeholder input,” he said.
The land-grant system, built to be near to and responsive to the local system, should also continue to serve as “a predictor, a bellwether, a crystal ball” for emerging food and agricultural needs, he added.
The system should focus on more long-range planning and strategy, more value-added commodities and products, more sophisticated consumers that want speciality products, and more non-traditional customers of agricultural products, he said.
Audience members should also be sure they let policymakers from local to national levels know what is needed to keep the U.S. agricultural system healthy.
Stenholm told the audience he was confident that specially targeted capital-gains tax relief was on it way for agriculture, and he was hopeful that targeted relief from inheritance taxes was also in the future.
He also said he was concerned that subsidization of U.S. agriculture was decreasing too quickly.
“A free market would certainly be in the best interest of everyone … but the world market is not a free market, and it seems to me we ought to go a little bit slow, that we ought not to consider unilateral disarmament of our agriculture under the blind theory of a philosophy out of textbooks from which many of you have taught,” he said.
He ended on a positive note, telling listeners again that he was confident in their abilities to focus on long-term solutions.
“What happens in the future starts here today,” he concluded.
-30-
AGPR TOP