Democratic VP Candidate Tim Walz as an elected House member represented a Minnesota farm community during his five terms in Congress. Here’s a 2016 Agri-Pulse interview with then Rep. Walz talking about the previous farm bill.
In a 2016 Meet the Lawmaker interview two years before he left Congress and was elected governor of Minnesota, Walz said he had been working on risk management tools for the 2018 farm bill. “I'm absolutely committed to making sure those tools remain solid. I think we need to build on them,” Walz said.
He also said he had learned that “our agricultural districts trump politics. So, Midwestern folks, sometimes we have some heated arguments with the rice and cotton guys, and the Western producers have issues with us over things. But I think that's a healthy dynamic, and that's why we get farm bills done.
“In this day and age, getting anything that big done is virtually impossible. We find a way to get farm bills done,” he said. That shows “what's possible when we work together for a common good.”
On China: Walz, who was then a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which focuses exclusively on human rights issues there, also spoke about relations with that country, where he spent a year teaching in 1989.
China needs “to play by the rules, both from an environmental, from a fair trade, and also from a human rights perspective,” he said. But Walz added that much more can be done to work with the communist nation.
“I don't fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” Walz said. “I totally disagree, and I think we need to stand firm on what they’re doing in the South China Sea. But there's many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”