Goal: Recognize and assist farming operations, especially family farms

Reasons: A safe, efficient food production system is essential for our security and economic growth. Both the large "corporate" farm operations and family farms have a role in the agricultural economy. The efficiency in food production has greatly improved during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Therefore, we can and should expand our utilization of such entrepreneurs by expanding our overseas markets (including places where hunger is an issue) and the role they play in energy conservation and development.

"The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth: the first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors --- this is robbery; the second by commerce, which is generally cheating; the third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man received a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry." -Benjamin Franklin