178 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 



Mr. Wallace: Gentlemen, I am glad of an opportunity to meet with the 

 loAva S^'^te Board of Agriculture and the representatives of the County 

 Fair Association. 



I was interested in what the preceding speaker said of the relation of 

 your county fairs to the agriculture of the state. He said very truly that 

 the prosperity of your fairs depended upon the prosperity of the farm. 



I presume that what you would like to hear from me is the conditions 

 as we see them down there. I have not any prepared speech. I have made 

 a few notes to talk to you on some of the different things that have come 

 up down there in the way of giving an account of my stewardship to you 

 people to whom I really owe my allegiance. I don't want to talk to you on 

 the general depression of agriculture; you realize it here. I suppose at 

 times you have felt it more severely out here than anywhere else. I want 

 to say this to you that this depression is general through practically all 

 the United States. It is true that some large sections have suffered per- 

 haps more than others. The farmers of the east for example have not felt 

 it so severely as in this great corn belt surplus producing section. There 

 are two reasons for that. Their agriculture is more diversified in a way 

 and they have not felt the full burden of the freight rate advance as you 

 have out here; in other words they are nearer the market. Another reason 

 for it, their land is not nearly as valuable, not worth nearly as much per 

 acre. And there is still another reason: a good many of them, at least the 

 territory to the south, are accustomed to take things very comfortably and 

 have not been accustomed to push as hard to get ahead as we have in this 

 western country. Throughout the south, the cotton producing section; 

 throughout the range country of the west; throughout the small grain 

 country of the southwest and northwest, this depression has been felt 

 just as much as in Iowa. In the northwest conditions are even worse. 



One of the first duties, practically the first duty laid upon me was to 

 loan two million dollars to the grain farmers of the northwest, particularly 

 Montana and North Dakota. Congress made the appropriation on March 

 3rd and on March 5th when I took office the first duty I had was to say 

 how we would handle that loan. They simply turned it over to us to be 

 paid out to the farmers of these sections to be used for buying seed grain 

 and under such rules and regulations as we might prescribe. We loaned 

 that to more than 13,000 individual farmers and got it all out in time for 

 spring seeding. Now we are in the process of collecting it and I want to 

 say to you in some parts of the northwest conditions are very, very 

 serious. Many of these people are in actual want for food and for clothing 

 and for the ordinary necessities of life. I am saying this to you not to try 

 to paint a dark picture, but to try to make you see that the Iowa farmer 

 is in about the same boat as farmers of other sections of the country. 

 Naturally you want to know what we are trying to do about it, what we are 

 doing about it there, and I think there is a feeling over the country that 

 not all is being done that can be done or that should be done. 



The first thing Congress undertook to do in the way of relief Avas the 

 enactment of the emergency tariff. Ordinarily when we have a great sur- 

 plus a tariff is not supposed to do so much good; the surplus itself ought 



