PROCEEDINGS STATE AGRICULTURAL CONVENTION 139 



that proceedings of these meetings be printed at the close of the conven- 

 tion and be distributed to the members. 



W. G. SMITH, 



S. J. JOHNSTON, 



S. D. QUARTON, Committee. 



The resolutions were adopted as read. 



President Cameron : Gentlemen, I don't think you need any intro- 

 duction to the next speaker. Iowa is proud of him. We have the 

 honor of presenting to you the head of the great Farm Bureau of 

 the United States, ]\Ir. John R. Howard. 



President Howard of the American Farm Bureau: Mr. Chairman and 

 gentlemien, I certainly am very glad to be back home again today and to 

 renew your acquaintances. I have been more or less rambling in a pretty 

 big field for the last two or three years. It has been an uncharted field. 

 It has been indeed a time of very great trouble and perplexity and hence 

 it has been harder to chart a course and hold true to it than would have 

 been true under normal conditions. 



If I were to tell you what I think has been the great function of the 

 American Farm Bureau, and I am speaking from the national viewpoint 

 today in the main rather than the state viewpoint, I would say that it has 

 been to burn the importance of agriculture into the consciousness of all 

 classes of this nation, and I assure you that is a job which is sorely 

 needed to be done because there are great numbers of our population and 

 great classes of American industry who do not stop to realize that the farm 

 is the basis of all our national prosperity. We have been telling these 

 people that their cities and rairoads and financial institutions have all 

 come from the soil of America, they are from the farms or the mines or 

 the forests and that which did not come directly from the farms came 

 indirectly from the farms. And all these cities and industrial institutions 

 have been built out of the margins between the farmers' or producers' 

 costs and the consumers' prices. We have been telling to them the story 

 that American agriculture is entering a new era, that the great vast ex- 

 panse of western lands which were available when most of us were boys 

 are now all under cultivation; that area expansion of agriculture is no 

 longer possible to any great extent, that our food supplies must come from 

 the lands now in tilling and that these things all demand the careful 

 thought not only of the farmer but the business man as well. 



It was a little more than a year ago that I met a representative of east- 

 ern industry on a train. He had been on some mission to South America. 

 He had served an apprenticeship for a number of years as secretary for a 

 millionaire eastern United States senator. I was telling him of some of 

 Iowa farm problems and that it was necessary to have a better agriculture 

 than we had previously had, that it was necessary in order to keep the 

 best feeling on the farms of America that the farmer have better prices 

 for his products than had before prevailed; that it was necessary for the 

 welfare of unborn generations that the fertility of this soil of ours be 

 maintained and not depleted. I remember well how he turned to me and 



