578 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



solution will be when it finally comes back, but perhaps by that time 

 European demand will have increased as fast as it comes back. I cer- 

 tainly hope it will. 



Foreign Market Service. 



Those are some of the things we ought to know if we would adjust 

 farming on an agricultural business basis. That is what the large handler 

 of those commodities knows, and he adjusts accordingly as he sees 

 these economic changes coming in foreign countries. Now, I think that 

 it is possible to build up a service of some kind that will give us this 

 sort of information, and I want to outline very briefly my ideas on that. 



In the past eight months I have visited almost all of the large agri- 

 cultural organizations of the country and asked them what was their 

 idea about the developing of a foreign market service. I have visited 

 the Cotton Growers' Association, the Dairymen's League, the Fruit 

 Growers' Association, and a number of other large associations of that 

 kind. I have attended just a dozen meetings of the grain and live stock 

 men here in the corn belt, and I have tried to figure out what kind of 

 service can be developed. 



Personally. I don't want a service that simply records history. As we 

 all know, government agencies are accused of developing simply a means 

 for recording things that happened after they happened — history mostly; 

 but in the marketing game we want to know what is happening, and 

 what is going to happen a year ahead of time. I feel that kind of 

 thing can be developed in grain and live stock and wool and cotton and 

 daily commodities, and I have tested it out considerably this summer 

 by trying to see what use could be made of our own consular service in 

 foreign countries, to see what information they could get, in a very 

 small way. 



Now, we have in the com countries of the world several hundred 

 men who are foreign consuls attached to either the State Department or 

 the Commerce Department, and then we have men under them called 

 attaches. These are men skilled in watching political events and the 

 trend of economic events, but they are not skilled in agricultural mat- 

 ters. These men are located in every large city in the world — South 

 America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and everywhere else. Now, I think with- 

 out any great difficulty, without duplicating any machinery, it would be 

 possible for us to put trained agricultural experts into the principal cen- 

 ters that we think will give us information — Russia, Argentine, Australia, 

 because they compete with us in grain and live stock. In Europe our 

 great market lies, and our responsibility lies in observing the trend of 

 agricultural conditions and live stock development. We should have cor- 

 respondents in every large city to keep us posted on the trend of agri- 

 cultural events, and I believe they could be made to render us a most 

 valuable service with reference to the packing industry of South America 

 as it relates to hogs, cattle and sheep. That would be of great value to 

 us in trying to shape our own agricultural policy. We could do the same 

 in Russia, in Argentine, in Australia. And in the great markets of the 

 world in Europe we should place our trained observers who would report 

 to us concerning the absorption of these products. 



