PROCEEDINGS CORN BELT MEAT PRODUCERS' ASSN. 565 



to their advantage — this is a good country to sell in and a poor country 

 to buy in, so far as those European nations are concerned, and our manu- 

 facturers are going to meet that very fierce competition. Now, to meet 

 that they have got to reduce their production cost to the very lowest pos- 

 sible point, and a very considerable part of their production cost is wages, 

 and wages must be related to the cost of foodstuffs, so that our manufac- 

 turers, in order to meet that competition, are going to demand of us, and 

 very properly, too, that we feed their workmen at the lowest possible 

 cost. More than that, they are going to buy the food for their workmen 

 wherever they can buy it cheapest. Now, to the south of us is develop- 

 ing a wonderful agricultural empire — Argentina. Uruguay, Brazil — rais- 

 ing grain and live stock, and, under present conditions, being able to lay 

 their products down on our eastern coast at a lower cost for shipment 

 than we in the corn belt can lay our products down. 



Now, you take those three things and connect them up and I think you 

 will see that they present problems which the farmers of the corn belt 

 have got to consider, and when I say farmers of the corn belt I mean all 

 citizens of the corn belt. We have got here the highest price land, every- 

 thing considered, in all the world; we have got also the most intelligent 

 farmers; we produce more per man than any other farmers, taken on an 

 average, but we have got to cheapen our production costs or increase 

 our yield if we are going to meet the competition that is coming in a 

 very short time. I am convinced of one thing that Iowa and states like 

 Iowa have got to go about it systematically to study their agriculture 

 from the business side. I am convinced that if Iowa will do that, even 

 if we can not cheapen our production costs so much, we can cheapen our 

 marketing costs and compete with our neighbors to the suth of us on 

 much evener terms than we thought. The day before I left Washington, 

 Harold Powell, manager of the California Orange Growers, was in my 

 office. Oranges are a luxury, but Powell told me that they sold one hun- 

 dred million dollars worth of oranges at a profit. They have done that 

 first by cooperative organization, by improving varieties, by careful grad- 

 ing their products, by cheapening their costs all along the line. They 

 own their own lumber mills out in the national forest and make their own 

 boxes. They have put the orange business on a sound business basis, 

 and they have studied the thing as the conditions demand, and they 

 study the conditions in every city day by day. They start their cars 

 from the west and keep control of them and deflect them from city to 

 city. In other words, they have applied modern business principles to 

 the marketing of an orchard crop. 



Now, I am convinced that if all the agencies in Iowa which are work- 

 ing for agricultural improvement will come together and study that mar- 

 keting problem alone — and when I say that I am not speaking of some 

 large effort to all at once overturn our system, but get right down to the 

 business and study the thing from the bottom — the grading of our prod- 

 ucts, the marketing of them in a thoroughly businesslike way — I am satis- 

 fied that we can make an enormous saving in the marketing of Iowa's 

 crops, and I am satisfied further that that sort of study will show us we 

 are growing too much of some crops and too little of other crops, and we 



