Fourth District Focus: Touring Lineage in Denison on my 36 County Tour
On October 14th, I kept my 36 County Tour going in Crawford County – honoring my promise to meet with Iowans in every county in the 4th Congressional District at least twice a year. Since beginning my 36 County Tour, I have been to Crawford County eight times—with each visit as interesting and informative as the next.
My previous trips include stops at Crossroads of Crawford County, a pregnancy resource center, and West Central Community Action Head Start, both of which are in Denison. I also previously joined a UPS driver on his package delivery route to learn more about our supply chains. All my stops inform my work in Congress for our communities and support my goal of finding solutions to the challenges facing our families, farmers, and businesses.
My most recent stop on my 36 County Tour took me to Denison once again to tour Lineage—a cold storage facility. Lineage is a leader in temperature-controlled storage worldwide. While we toured the facilities, we talked about the importance of building proper refrigeration infrastructure both here at home and abroad so that we can ship our perishable commodities across the globe. One of the largest barriers to growing Iowa’s agricultural export market is insufficient cold chain capacity and port deficiencies. Without proper cold storage infrastructure and port improvements, many of our products cannot survive the export process. This leads to less product being shipped globally and less profit for our producers.
This is why I have been working in Congress— as a member of the House Agriculture Committee—to have the Fortifying Refrigeration Infrastructure and Developing Global Exports (FRIDGE) Act included in the new Farm Bill. This will help develop much-needed cold-storage and port infrastructure to ship our beef, chicken, turkey, pork, grains, specialty crops, and other perishable goods worldwide. This is vital infrastructure that would increase the quality and strength of Iowa’s—and the United States’—international agriculture markets. With greater and more consistent access to new and developing markets, our farmers can keep more money in their pockets, our economy will realize serious financial benefits, and American competitiveness in global agricultural trade will strengthen.
The development of these markets is more important now than ever. The Biden-Harris administration continues to refuse to negotiate new trade agreements that benefit our farmers and rural main streets, and low commodity prices are straining our producers’ bottom lines. It’s also why my colleagues on the House Agriculture Committee and I doubled funding for the Market Access Program (MAP) and the Foreign Market Development Program (FMD) in the Farm Bill to promote American-made goods in foreign markets. The longer we don’t have an updated Farm Bill, the longer we run the risk of being outpaced by China and other adversaries in international agriculture markets. I’ll keep working to get the Farm Bill signed into law as soon as possible.
Traveling around the Fourth District and hearing about the issues that matter most to Iowans is one of the most important parts of my job. I will continue to work with our communities to find solutions to the problems we face and pass meaningful policies that help Iowa thrive.