Kent Conrad

I've had lengthy discussions with European farm leaders. It is clear they have an agricultural strategy to support their producers and gain dominance in world agricultural trade. They're gaining markets the old-fashioned way - they're buying them.

When you're borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that you spend, that can't continue much longer. I think everybody really does understand that, and it's going to require all of us - those who are the most fortunate among us - but it's really going to require every American to contribute to a solution.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.