184 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 



tions will largely be restored, and when we get through this as I see it we 

 are facing an entirely new period in American agriculture. Heretofore 

 the young man who got a tight hold of a piece of land and had enough 

 money to buy a very modest farming equipment and had a good wife 

 and who had in him a capacity for work, was almost certain to get ahead. 

 He had to economize; he didn't make money one year with another on 

 his farm operations, but that piece of land was steadily increasing in value 

 and he could see that. He could afford to economize, he could afford to 

 live almost penuriously because he could see he was getting ahead through 

 the advance in that piece of land. Now we have taken up practically all 

 of our easily tillable land. We have millions of acres which can be 

 brought under cultivation when conditions justify, and especially when 

 prices justify, but all of the easily tillable land has been taken up and 

 we have come to a period now when we have skimmed the cream off of 

 the advance in land. We have come to the point where we cannot expect 

 these rapid advances. We have come to the point where the farmer 

 cannot afford to lose money in his farm operations with the idea he is 

 going to get it back through increase in value of land, because the value 

 of land will not increase rapidly enough to enable him to do that. 



So as I see it we are coming now into an entirely new period in agricul- 

 ture where farming has got to be put on a solid business basis just as any 

 other business and where one year with the other the farmer can be able to 

 make a fair profit in addition to interest on his investment, and it is 

 going to take the combined wisdom and judgment of the best informed men 

 in this whole country to maintain our agriculture under those conditions. 

 We have loaned foreign nations ten or eleven billions of dollars. I say 

 we have loaned it in dollars. As a matter of fact we have loaned that much 

 value in commodities. There is not enough money over there to pay even 

 the annual interest charge on the money we have loaned them which 

 means that if they pay back these debts they have got to pay them back 

 in the same form in which we loaned them, in commodities of one sort or 

 another. That means our manufacturing industries are going into a 

 period of the most severe competition, and all the more severe because of 

 the disparity of the money values of the United States and practically all 

 foreign countries. This is a good country to sell in, not a good country to 

 buy in. That means our manufacturers are against the most severe com- 

 petition they have ever experienced. To meet that competition they have 

 got to reduce production costs in every way possible. That means they 

 are going to demand the cheapest possible food. They are going to insist 

 on their grains and live stock products to be just as cheap as they can pos- 

 sibly be furnished, and they are not going to be particular as to where they 

 come from. 



Then you take the third factor; down to the south of us is a great agri- 

 cultural empire, Argentine and Brazil and Uruguay constitute a tremen- 

 dous agricultural empire. In Brazil they can grow anything we grow in 

 Iowa and in addition grow a lot of tropical products we can't grow. Ship- 

 ping rates to these South American countries going to our consumption 

 centers along the eastern coast and for 250 to 300 miles this side are lower 

 than the shipping rates from Iowa to those same points. Now you take 



