TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART II 163 



one another and get a brief course in agriculture, don't you suppose it 

 would make them better farmers? In other words, in this business course 

 in agriculture I would have a sort of review of some work that they had 

 taken up during the college and school career, but I know that it should 

 be of such nature that it would be applicable to everyday life of the farm 

 — common, plain agriculture, arithmetic, some business letter writing, 

 some farm studies, etc., but the main thing is in getting those 80 or 120 

 young men to thinking in the same direction and see their business from 

 the co-operative standpoint. Supposing you got only 40 or 50 of those 

 fellows together, in 10 years' time, if you only had 40 per winter, you 

 would have 400 men who had studied their business together and were 

 acquainted with one another, and who understood their duties in that 

 community, and what would it mean for citizenship! That's the prob- 

 lem! If that thing could be put over we would have no fear of the situ- 

 ation to which some speakers referred last night. We are standing back 

 of a program of that kind. We went to the legislature last winter and 

 asked them for appropriations so that that could be brought about to a 

 certain extent. We are asking the co-operation of every educational in- 

 stitution in the state for the development of that particular line of work, 

 and we hope to push it through. Legislation, my friends, is not made in 

 the legislature; legislation is not politics; legislation from the agricul- 

 tural standpoint is that legislation which stands for community develop- 

 ment, which stands for the pi'otection and interest of those particular 

 interests we are interested in, and looking at it from the standpoint of 

 the live-and-let-live principle. We are not standing for class legislation 

 or class distinction, but we are standing for the development of our par- 

 ticular interests on a common basis with all other lines of work. Our 

 president, Mr. Howard, is in Washington today; he is there on a pro- 

 gram, friends, that is the greatest thing that ever came before the people 

 of the corn belt, and that is that he is down there today fighting for 

 some measure to control or eradicate the corn borer, which is an insect 

 that is coming into the eastern states and is moving into New York state, 

 it is as far west as Ohio, following along the New York Central lines. 

 That corn borer, if you ever had a chance to investigate, takes every- 

 thing, and if it got into this $416,000,000 corn crop and was spread broad- 

 cast over the state of Iowa, what would happen to your $300, $400 or 

 $500 land? Now, gentlemen, that Is a problem that is going to take or- 

 ganized effort to solve. It is worse than the ravages of the foot-and- 

 mouth disease ever could be, and it is our business to fight it by organ- 

 ized effort. Those are a few problems with which we are going to 

 contend. 



I wish I had time to read you the platform of the American Farm 

 Bureau which was adopted at Chicago. It shows our attitude with re- 

 gard to the various existing lines of work that the farm bureau stands 

 for. How much time have I, Mr. Chairman? 



The Chairman : Five minutes. 



Mr. Coverdale: I will read it in five minutes. This is the plat- 

 form that was adopted by thirty-three states of the Union that met 



