Madam Speaker, we are dealing with an awful lot of grave issues. Indeed, they become crises when they aren't managed correctly in this country. So we are hearing a lot about inflation and feeling the effects, especially regular people,…
Madam Speaker, we are dealing with an awful lot of grave issues. Indeed, they become crises when they aren't managed correctly in this country.
So we are hearing a lot about inflation and feeling the effects, especially regular people, middle-income people, lower-middle-income people, low-income people are being harmed by the policies put forth the last year and a quarter.
We hear a lot about how Americans are paying more:
Vehicles. You can't hardly find a new vehicle, and the price of used vehicles has skyrocketed.
Gas at the pump. Do I need to talk about that anymore?
Lodging.
Airline fares to even get us to our jobs here in Washington, D.C., but for regular people on vacation and doing their business as well.
What isn't being talked about enough? The cost of food and the availability of food.
Inflation is hitting it hard, too.
Cost of inputs.
In my home State, lack of water. Lack of water in California.
Why does that matter to the rest of the country? Well, I will tell you. Farms and ranches produce about $50 billion in output in California, but there needs to be water for the crops.
Environmental laws are forcing the release of water down the rivers and out to the oceans for coho salmon, delta smelt, et cetera.
Our agriculture sector in California is the most important in the United States. There are a lot of other very important sectors as well.
We lead the Nation in over 77 different crops, including many fruit and vegetable specialty crops. Our top commodities are milk, almonds, grapes, cattle and calves, strawberries, pistachios, lettuce, walnuts, floriculture, tomatoes, rice, broilers, carrots, hay, broccoli, tangerines, oranges, and lemons, to name a few.
Our State is the only producer--which means 99 percent or more--of almonds, artichokes, celery, figs, garlic, honeydew, nectarines, olives, peaches, sweet rice, and walnuts.
For almonds, California grows all the domestic production, and 77 percent of global production comes from California.
So it is kind of important that the water flows through our State. That is one of the important inputs that we are short on.
I talked about the energy costs. On my own farm, we are fortunate enough to have a fairly decent water allocation where I live in my part of the State, but I have neighbors to the west and south of me receiving, in some cases, zero percent allocations. Zero.
Take rice production, for example. It is going to be down probably by about half. As a rice grower that gravely concerns me, but as a food producer, and all of you as food consumers, you need to be greatly concerned. These policies can be avoided. We still have a point that we can save this springtime and get crops planted with water that is available presently.
Instead, we are watching world events here. Ukraine, their farmers are dodging bombs right now trying to get crops planted. Russia has actually been somewhat of an important exporter, not so much to this country but we import some things from them: fertilizer, some of our energy.
We need to be putting a stop to that and become self-sufficient like we can. We should have energy independence. We had that up until a year ago.
So we are going to keep shorting ourselves on crops growing because of environmental laws, taking the water away, shifting it to a fish that doesn't even exist in the delta anymore in northern California, the smelt. Trillions of gallons of water going out into the ocean and fields being idled; permanent crops being destroyed; trees and vines just dying because there is no water for them.
We are going to feel that. We are already feeling it in the stores. When you can go to a major supermarket and see a whole freezer section has nothing in it, in the United States of America, that blows my mind. We can grow plenty here, and we always have until these times. Environmental laws are trumping what people need. Bad energy policy is driving the cost of everything.
Some of the fertilizer I have to put on my crops has over doubled in price. That all has to be made up somewhere. Either the farmer eats it and goes out of business, or it has to be made up on a store shelf. Somewhere along the chain it has to be made up for.
We can produce the energy that produces fertilizer that fuels the tractors, the trucks, the combines, everything it takes to bring a crop in, we can produce it here. We are capable of it. Yet, we are being paralyzed by policies at the Federal level and at my home State level as well.
One of the ideas in the legislature on top of everything, on top of this $6 gas we have in California, is to add more gas tax on top of that by our State legislature.
That is not your problem, the rest of the country. I mean, sometimes we are a comic show at what we do out there, and we get laughed at by the rest of the country, but we won't fix it here. It needs to be fixed there.
Don't do what we do, okay, rest of the country?
We need to set policy here where we can in Congress at the Federal level that brings us energy independence and helps put food back on the table instead of taking the water away and raising the costs of everything so much that we can't farm this country anymore.