PROCEEDINGS CORN BELT MEAT PRODUCERS' ASSN. 563 



work, it has gotten to be a habit of putting the Secretary of Agriculture on 

 commissions of several sorts. For example, there is a federal power com- 

 mission which has charge of all of the navigable streams of the United 

 States. No man can build a dam for water power purposes without first 

 getting the permission of the federal power commission, and they made 

 the Secretary of Agriculture a member of that commission. The other 

 two members are the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Interior. And 

 then there is the national park conservation commission; there is the 

 commission which deals with the purchase of forests. We have bought 

 in the last ten years over 2,000,000 acres of forest land — bought and admin- 

 istered by the government; and there is this commission and that com- 

 mission that they have gotten the habit of putting the Secretary of Agri- 

 culture on, so that you see if you do justice to your own administrative 

 work within the department, and do even partial justice to the work that 

 is expected of you as a member of these various commissions you haven't 

 got a great deal of time to waste, and you haven't a great deal of time to 

 spend in pleasure. 



Of course, under conditions which existed last spring, and which still 

 exist in large measure, it was perfectly natural that we should turn every 

 effort of the department to relieving this financial stress, and toward 

 trying to find and enlarge our markets for this great crop surplus, and 

 toward improving our marketing facilities. We sent some cotton experts 

 overseas to see if we could send more of our cotton over there, to see if 

 we could enlarge the foreign outlet for our cotton. We sent our experts 

 over there to enlarge the outlet for our meats, and also others for the 

 outlet of our grains. We have done about everything that we could do for 

 ourselves, or that anyone could suggest to us that sounded at all practical 

 to try to relieve this situation. Some of that work has been helpful, none 

 of it has been as helpful as we had hoped it might be. I think In looking 

 into the future we will get a great deal of benefit from some of the work 

 we have done during the past six months, especially in foreign fields, but 

 it is not going to come quickly. You know, when we first got into this 

 real agricultural depression, it was common to hear people say, the only 

 trouble with us is that the people overseas aren't buying as much as they 

 have been, and the thing for us to do is arrange credits for them so that 

 they can continue to buy. We found that wasn't true. Those people 

 were not slackening in their buying because of lack of credits. They 

 were buying what they needed, but we were in a period of falling prices, 

 and instead of laying up a surplus as they had in years past they were 

 buying from hand to mouth just as we are, because of that period of fall- 

 ing prices, and the further extension of credits to them offer no prospect 

 of enlarging our sales. We found some other conditions which we think 

 can be improved and which will enlarge in time our foreign outlet. 



Then looking at the conditions here at home, I found this in the depart- 

 ment, and I am not saying this by way of criticism but simply stating the 

 fact as it developed, and it applies not only to the Department of Agri- 

 culture but to our various agricultural colleges and other agencies that 

 have been looking toward the improvement of agriculture: The major 

 emphasis during the past forty years has been to improve methods of 



