TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 573 



I will therefore first introduce to you a Nebraska boy who later 

 took training in the east in Cornell College, and is now in charge 

 of the foreign markets of the Department of Agriculture — Mr. 

 Montgomery. 



WHAT OF THE MARKET FOR FARM PRODUCTS? 

 By E. G. Montgomery. 



Last January one day I happened to pick up the leading agricultural 

 paper of the United States — and of course I won't have to tell you gentle- 

 men here the name of that paper (laughter), and this sentence caught 

 my eye: "The farmers of the United States are entitled to just as good 

 information in regard to supply and demand of agricultural products as 

 anyone." And then it went on to explain that many of the large market- 

 ing agencies, such as the large buyers of live stock, the buyers of grain, 

 etc., had their own informational service more or less developed; they 

 had statisticians in their employ in foreign countries, and were able 

 to go to their files and learn what is going on anywhere in the world; but 

 as a rule the farmer doesn't know what is going to happen until some 

 time after it has happened, which is usually too late to help him very 

 much in forecasting his marketing. 



That appealed to me very much, for this reason, for several years 

 I had been particularly interested in the study of the world supply of and 

 demand for agricultural commodities, and it seemed to me that there was 

 an opportunity for real service if we could develop that. 



Now just at present there is a vast amount of interest in the world 

 situation with regard to foodstuffs and raw materials, such as wool, cot- 

 ton and grain. That is particularly an outgrowth of the interest we took 

 in those subjects during the war. For the first time in history, our 

 newspapers, our local papers and our farm papers, talk about the world 

 supply of food, the world supply of clothing, the world supply of leather, 

 and so on. Heretofore we had only talked of our own local affairs, but 

 it was impressed upon us during those two or three years of war the 

 tremendous importance and the serious depletion of these things which 

 were produced thruout the world, and the demand of the woria now for 

 those products which America alone seems to have ir abundance. 



We also realize that there is one great market cei..-^r for raw prod- 

 ucts, for agricultural products, and that is Europe. All the rest of the 

 world produces a surplus of more or less importance, so that you have 

 one continent, and the western half of that continent particularly, west- 

 ern Europe, which is a market, and you have all the other continents 

 delivering goods to that market in competition with each other to a 

 certain extent. That is practically the world market as I see it. 



World Price Levels. 



Now, I think we are beginning to recognize that most of these great 

 commodities are controlled by world price levels. I have heard some 

 things lately that indicated that some people thought we could get 

 away from world price levels, that it was possible to create small monop- 

 olies in a state or in three or four states, or in one country, and to a 



