I believe the American agricultural worker is the most productive and most efficient and one of my jobs is to open every market in the world to your products. As you know I came back recently from a trip to Colombia. Colombia is the largest importer of American agricultural products in South America and yet he Democrats will not agree to the Columbian Fair Trade Agreement which actually harms our ability to get more products into those markets so I’m a free trader and I believe that we need to get our agricultural products into markets all over the world and it will be a great thing for America not to mention our trade deficit...

I believe that one of the most onerous or unfair taxes is the Estate Tax or the Death Tax. I agree with my friend (Sen.) Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) who’s worked so hard on this issue that we should have the first $10 million exempt, anything above that taxed at a 15% rate… It’s outrageous that you should not be able to pass on to your children and grandchildren the hard- earned fruits of your labor...

We need a temporary worker program associated with tamper-proof biometric documents so that you as an employer will know that that person is a temporary worker in the United States and you wont’ have to worry about a bogus social security card or birth certificate...

In this election I think America’s farmers face a choice. I have a lot of respect for John McCain and his service to our country, but we have a lot of serious differences when it comes to rural and agricultural policy. And the best recent example is the farm bill. I would have liked to have seen some additional reforms in the bill. I would like to see some tighter payment limits for example, but on balance the bill did a lot more good than bad because it dramatically increased the funding to fight hunger, it increased funding for conservation and it provided farmers with at least some stability in an increasing volatile market...

My goal would be in the first year to have comprehensive immigration reform done. Obviously, what affects farmers most immediately is agricultural workers. This is one area where it is legitimate to say that without immigrant workers, a lot of farms in the America are shut down. We just don’t have a lot of U.S. born workers who are interested in doing what is very difficult work on this front. My commitment to you, at minimum, is we would have the AgJobs portion of the immigration reform package done, hopefully by that first year. I think we have strong bipartisan consensus on that front. More broadly, I believe in the comprehensive immigration reform that both John McCain and I supported last year and two years ago. Unfortunately, John McCain has backed off it. I think there is pressure in his party and when he was given the nominate, he said he wouldn’t vote for his own bill. I think it is very important for us to recognize that if we are going to have a vital agriculture industry this has to get resolved and I intend to resolve it quickly...

I think corn-based ethanol has been a critical bridge technology to make America more energy independent. Now, I think we have to realize it’s going to have some limitations. It has some environmental effects. And that is why we have to help, to work with farmers to make cellulosic ethanol technology widely available, economical and profitable. And that is why part of my goal would be to phase in a 2 billion gallon cellulosic ethanol renewable fuel standard into the nation’s fuel supply by 2013. I am not interested in rolling back the renewable fuel standard. I think it is something that is critically important to supporting the agricultural sector and rural America, and I think that the use of ethanol as a scapegoat for rising fuel prices is misplaced. If we don’t invest in American grown biofuels and advanced technologies, our nation is never going to be energy independent. And that is why I am proud to have been a consistent supporter of biofuels and I will continue to be so in the future...