Ag Secretary On Farming

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack spent some time with this year's National Association of Farm Broadcasters in Kansas City last Friday. Vilsack talked about three recent announcements made by USDA.

VILSACK: The first announcement was the export announcement. The fact that we have now reached a record level of agricultural exports. Once again, $140.9 billion dollars of exports. It's the best five years of ag exports in the history of the country. If compare it to the previous period we've done $230 billion dollars more of agricultural exports and our volume is up as well on average. Nearly 40-million tons more per year is being exported throughout the world.

He says they have been very aggressive when it comes to export promotion.

VILSACK: Over the last 4 1/2 years we've knocked down 1298 efforts by the international community to make it a little bit harder for our ag goods to get into the stream of commerce and of course we are very much engaged in the free trade agreement negotiations and discussions. Opening up a couple of free trade agreements a year or so ago but now focused on the Trans Pacific Partnership and the EU free trade agreements.

He says both he and the President are very hopeful that will open up. He also talked about the new National Drought Resiliency Partnership.

VILSACK: Part of that was an opportunity to travel around the country and listen to folks and producers in particular as to what we could do better, what we could do more, what we could do differently

That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.