 It is my honor now to introduce Senator Welch to say a few words. Senator, we are so appreciative of what you and your team have done for months now and really over the past several weeks. We are also grateful for you bringing undersecretary Bonnie here with us today. It is extremely important to have USDA leadership aware of the challenges that our communities and farms are facing. We've appreciated the chance to work with you and your team here in Vermont and we can attest first hand to the dedication many late nights on the road with your team and we have seen you working extremely hard in communities in so many different ways. We are also particularly grateful for your kind of technical expertise navigating the federal side of the flood response. Thank you very much for being here today, Senator. That is, I just want to congratulate you on your declaration of inclusion. That is really wonderful and what a decision we've made here that you are the recipient of that award. Robert, have we needed it more than right now with the rain still falling from these storms and so many Vermonters desperately needing help locally and federally and we're going to hear from Robert Bonnie in a few minutes. I just want to say a couple of things. First of all, I got here a little late, but on time to hear that incredible singer. How do you do that? Seriously, that is so astonishing. What a wonderful, Josh, thank you so much for that. Really, really extraordinary. I was coming in and I heard it and I want to know where am I? I didn't know I was at Lincoln Center, you know, right here in Randolph Center, Vermont. That was really, really terrific. You know, Bernie and Becca and I have been touring the catastrophic damage all around Vermont and yesterday under Secretary Bonnie and I and Bernie were in Richmond at the Conan Farm, seventh generations of farmers went down the shawram and we saw all those roke the peach trees with no peaches and the apple trees with apple blight and it's the end that we saw folks in Montpelier whose businesses are wiped out. We saw the Ethan Allen plant, which provides 260 jobs in Orleans and was underwater. It was about four feet higher than what they had in Orleans. Sarah Waring was there with us so many of these times. And then I remember a family in Johnson. The father lived in this very modest home on I think second street that got totally flooded and his daughter who lived in Belvedere and her partner came over in the morning, like I'm talking two in the morning and she brought a raft that didn't inflate and they were determined to get to the house to get their father out. And the partner, the daughter's partner said, I said, how did you do it? He said, I'm not quite sure but I just kept swimming and he literally swam and then pulled this man out of the home. And it was a combination of feelings that you get because on the one hand it's so devastating to experience someone who's losing their home. I mean think about that for each of us, right? You just lose all that sense of security, something you've built, something you've been able to count on. But then to see this love that went into the rescue that there was this total determination that they were going to take care of their father and that's obviously incredibly inspiring. So you know we're seeing this all around Vermont with this most recent flood that doesn't even get the designation of a storm. And we all know we've got to deal with climate change and that's the big part of it. We all know that we have to build with resiliency. But here's what you know and what I so admire about the award, what I so admire about the local officials, what you did in Plymouth, it was so extraordinary. The most significant political act, it's not what Bernie does as a U.S. Senator or I do as a U.S. Senator or Becca as a U.S. member of Congress. That's what you do in your community with your neighbor responding to the challenges that they face and that political act is a statement of hope and commitment to the future and a recognition that you can't have a future without community because what we're seeing around Vermont, you know the federal help is going to come in but it takes a while and what's really most important and can only be done is by neighbors in the community person to person. So it's a radical political act to make that commitment to build the community in where you live and that's what I so appreciate about all of you and what you're doing. Those of us in Washington will do our part, try to get the resources back here and it's a battle down there with all of the noise that you all are hearing. But you know what? The harder job is the day in, the day out sustained commitment to your own family, to your own community, to your own local volunteer fire department, to your local small bank, to your local small business where that web of interconnections allows all of us in that community to feel somebody's got our back and where we live with the confidence that when our neighbor needs us, we'll have their back. That's what gets us through. In our goal with the federal aid is to make sure that the seventh generation farm and others like it are here another generation because we've got folks with small businesses, we've got folks whose homes have been devastated, we've got farmers who are making calculated decisions. Can I keep doing this? And this is where the federal aid comes in because we've got to make it possible for those folks to open the doors of that business another day. We've got to make it possible for those family farmers to decide, you know what, let's keep this going and hope we get another generation. We've got to make that decision for that family who doesn't know where they're going to live that there's going to be a place for them in Vermont so they can continue to be part of our community. So thank you all very much for all that you do because it is where you are doing it that ultimately it has to be done. So I want to introduce Robert Bondi, the undersecretary, the Department of Agriculture and it's been inspiring to me to just see the response from the administration that the FEMA administrator was up here right away, the Secretary of Transportation was up here right away but the USDA actually probably has more on the ground capacity to help us than any of the other organizations. And traveling with you, Mr. Secretary, it was really terrific, you know, you do something that we kind of appreciate in Vermont, you're like, listen, and the second thing you do that we appreciate is you know what you're talking about and the third thing is that you give us confidence that you're going to do everything you possibly can, understanding that you'd like to do a lot more but everything that can be done will be done in every door that we can possibly open, you're going to help us try to open it. So please join me in welcoming the undersecretary, Robert Bondi. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be with you all. It's an honor to follow an outstanding opera performance for heroes and a rock star senator. My job at USDA, I'm the undersecretary for farm production and conservation. My job is to work with farmers, ranchers, forest owners across the country to help keep them in business, provide financing, risk management tool to help them conserve their lands and to make sure that that seventh generation sticks around and that we get an eighth generation on the conant dairy in places like Vermont. And as the senator pointed out, I had a chance yesterday to tour the state, look at some of the challenges brought about by flood, frost, rain, and to see some of the farm families and meet with them and some of the businesses that rely on those farm families and understand the challenges they face. Unfortunately, this is an increasing part of my job. I served at the Department of Agriculture during the Obama administration and find myself this go around spending a lot more time dealing with disasters exactly like this. And what you see, what we saw yesterday and what you see across the country is the resilience of farmers and ranchers and forest landowners and communities to deal with these challenges. USDA assistance is important and we understand that and want to be as flexible as we can and adapt what we can to the circumstances here. Agriculture in Vermont looks different than it does in places like Iowa or California. You've got many more smaller producers organic in the value-added business and we're going to work as hard as we can to make sure our programs work for those farmers. But an important part of us making our assistance work better is our partnership with all of you. You all can help us do a better job and the meetings yesterday were really important to open up a dialogue so we can better understand how to help folks get back on their feet and get back into the business of producing the food and fiber that Vermont and society needs. But it's no different when we think about rural development. The same types of partnerships are critical. In the Biden administration we've got significant new resources through the bipartisan infrastructure law through the Inflation Reduction Act and other pieces of legislation that have been passed by Congress with the help of your congressional delegation I might add. One of the challenges and one of the conversations that's happening in the administration is how do we make sure those resources are equitably used? How do we make sure maybe the rural towns that weren't thought about in the past, the historically underserved towns and in my case farmers and ranchers, Indian tribes and others, how do we make sure that those resources are available to them? And there's a conversation happening within the administration which is a conversation you all have been having for a long time about how do we strengthen the capacity of rural communities and of all communities to access federal resources? And it relies on volunteers and folks willing to step into the breach and seek out those resources. And so the conversation within the administration is how do we do a better job of serving all of you? How do we help create the capacity? How do we make sure the doors are open but that we would actually invite folks in to be able to take advantage of these resources? At USDA, we've helped work with other federal agencies through something called the Rural Partners Network that allows us to share resources across the federal family. But that model really comes from folks like yourselves that have been doing this for a long time, organizing yourselves to be able to take advantage of federal resources, state resources and others. So whether it's dealing with flooding or other challenges that you all face, I want you to know that USDA wants to be your partner, that we want to listen, that we understand that you all are going to need flexibility in our programs and we'll do our level best to make sure that that happens. Most of all, we want to be your partner. We want to work with you and we look forward to doing that in the days and years ahead. Thank you.