ABC 6 News - KAAL
(ABC 6 NEWS) -- Senator Amy Klobuchar toured southern Minnesota today for several agriculture-related visits.
The trip comes on the heels of the senator's move to create incentives for domestic renewable fuel production while also reducing the nation's budget deficit.
Senator Amy Klobuchar toured Tom Vavra Farms in Blooming Prairie Saturday.
It was one of three agricultural-based stops she made over the weekend to show the local strides being made in southern Minnesota.
"One of the things is to check in with some of our farmers, dairy farmers, corn farmers, to look at what's going on with soy beans. It's been a great export market there. As well as talk to some of our people in the biofuels plants to really get a sense of what we should be doing in Washington, D.C. to create more jobs and keep the jobs we have in rural Minnesota," says U.S. Senator, Amy Klobuchar.
Earlier in the week, Klobuchar announced a bipartisan agreement in the Senate to do away with the 45-cent-per-gallon ethanol tax credit at the end of this month.
"We could have let it just kind of dwindle away and instead the industry came to the table and said, "Ok, why don't we give two thirds of it to the debt and then we can take the other third?" And instead of it just going into the subsidy it's going to go into blender pumps, small producer tax credit, things that they believe is most important to keeping ethanol strong," says Klobuchar.
Farmers agree with Sen. Klobuchar, that ethanol is a key to this country's future.
"Well if we don't subsidize ethanol it will struggle. We definitely need to keep that alive. I can't stress that enough. Agriculture is the back bone of America here and especially southern Minnesota," says Tom Vavra, owner of Vavra Farms.
Klobuchar says, "Ethanol is now 10 percent of our fuel supply. There's a study in the Chicago Tribune that showed if you got rid of ethanol gas prices would go up a dollar a gallon. I don't think that's where anyone wants to be."
The bipartisan agreement to dedicate $1.3 billion to federal debt reduction and $668 million towards renewable fuel incentives still needs to be considered by the full Senate to take effect.