PROCEEDINGS IOWA FAIR MANAGERS ASSN. 1S3 



There was no way by which we could extend credit and get business and 

 increase materially the stuff we sold overseas. Those people were doing 

 exactly what we were doing here. The markets were full and they were not 

 buying as they had done in days past, buying and storing there, they were 

 buying a hand to mouth market, they didn't want to take any they didn't 

 need in the next two or three weeks. That is exactly the same thing each 

 one of us did. 



I think our investigations overseas have been helpful; they will be 

 especially helpful to us in the future. We have not been able to greatly 

 stimulate our sales over there although I may say this that until the last 

 two months our exports of agricultural products have been very, very 

 much above exports in years just preceding the war. And until these 

 people get back on a pre-war basis and especially until they get their 

 financial system stabilized and quit printing money turned out on the 

 printing presses, until they stop doing that we must expect a slow trade 

 from over there. 



Then at home as I say I have reorganized the economic work of the de- 

 partment with a view to not only study this present emergency but look- 

 ing into the future and trying to anticipate such periods as this or less 

 severe periods, and guard against them. I feel very, very deeply that if 

 our department of agriculture and our agricultural colleges and our 

 farmers' organizations had given even a half as much study to the eco- 

 nomics of agriculture and the things which influence prices and the opera- 

 tion of the law of supply and demand and kept in touch all the time with 

 foreign production and foreign consumption and various factors influenc- 

 ing the demand for our products — if they had given even half as much 

 thought to that as they gave to increased production, we could have 

 anticipated in large part this trouble that has come upon us. I think 

 that our whole method of agricultural education and work of the experi- 

 ment stations and work of the federal department of agriculture itself 

 and the work of your state boards of agriculture have got to be reorganized 

 and reconstructed with a view to getting an understanding of these 

 great fundamental forces that influence agricultural prosperity. We find 

 ourselves just in about the same situation the people of Paris were in 

 when the shells of that great gun began to fall; they didn't know where 

 they came from, didn't know what was hitting them, and it took them a 

 little time to find out and locate it and see where the trouble was. We 

 have been in about that same condition in this period of agricultural de- 

 pression; we haven't been able to size up our trouble, see what it was 

 hitting us. We have gone through three of them in my life time and we 

 have come out of every one of them without realizing or knowing what 

 was behind them, and studying the business side of agriculture. 



I hope we will not come out of this without fully appreciating the im- 

 portance of marketing our crops intelligently, of adjusting production to 

 the needs of consumption and the study of all the factors which influence 

 production and price, and if we have learned that lesson from this then 

 the experience will not have been wholly lost. Now looking toward the 

 future, we are going to come through this emergency, we are going to 

 be hurt some, but the world is going to settle down and pre-war condi- 



