National Rural Summit

National Rural Summit. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack was in Missouri last week for the National Rural Summit, the capstone of the rural tour that was conducted last year in some 45 states to listen to the concerns and needs of rural America. VILSACK: The purpose of the summit yesterday – we actually had three principal purposes – the first purpose was to make sure we could educate Americans about the important role that farmers and ranchers and farm workers and rural residents play in the lives of every single American. We wanted to make sure folks understood and appreciated the role that we play in rural America in providing them a quality, safe, nutritious and affordable food Vilsack says that 1 out of every 12 jobs in the U.S. are connected to the farming industry. VILSACK: The second purpose of this was to make sure that the people in the country understood some of the economic challenges that folks in rural America and particularly our farmers and ranchers are facing not just as a result of the recession we're emerging from but more specifically over the last number of decades. It's important for folks to know we lost mid-sized operations in the last 5 years according to our census. That we have a million fewer farmers today than we did 40 years ago. Along with that rural counties are losing population and therefore losing representation. And the age of the farmer is getting older with fewer young people getting into it, especially since there is a major disparity in the income of farmers to metropolitan workers. VILSACK: The third and most important reason for having this summit was to outline a new framework for revitalizing rural America based on what we had heard throughout our travels and to determine whether or not we were on the right track or whether we needed to make adjustments to our strategy. We talked specifically about expanding markets, both domestic and foreign markets and spent some time talking about the effort to sort of reinvigorate our trade efforts as well as creating domestic markets through the "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" opportunity linking local producers with local markets and local consumers. Another aspect discusses during the summit was biofuels. VILSACK: We focused on our commitment at USDA to building a nationwide biofuels and renewable energy industry and wanted to know if people felt as we did that this was really a critical component to revitalizing the rural community. More on that tomorrow. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.