TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 609 



gins with i\Ir. Thorne, but those of you who were fortunate 

 enough to hear Mr. Thorne last night were glad that you were at 

 the banquet, for he said something. So this morning we will 

 begin with a talk on the low^a Farm Bureau Federation by Mr. 

 Hunt. 



THE IOWA FARM BUREAU FEDERATION. 



By C. W. Hunt, President. 



I am scheduled on your program to talk to you awhile about the Iowa 

 Farm Bureau Federation. I might say that we have had organizations 

 of farmers more or less for the past fifty years, perhaps farther back 

 than that; they have come, had their day of prosperity, some of them 

 have entirely subsided, others are still here. I would not say that those 

 organizations springing up had been failures; I believe they have done 

 some good. I know that we have the idea that we are talking too much, 

 that we haven't done anything in the last fifty years but talk, yet at the 

 same time I believe that a great deal of good has been done by the 

 Grange and others I might name that have been doing good along the 

 line of elevating the farmer to a better position in this world. 



We have not succeeded in the big objective point, however, and a 

 lot of us have faith that the Farm Bureau Federation, together with these 

 other organizations — I believe I will call them commodity organizations — 

 that we now have are going to finally get a definite program that will 

 v/ork and will get for the farmer a chance to name the price of the prod- 

 ucts that he produces; a chance to have something to say, at least, as 

 to the selling prices of the products that he produces. It seems to me 

 that is our big aim, and I have faith in this federation as it is now organ- 

 ized. We will have some troubles, of course; we will have to lay aside 

 some prejudices that we have. 



We have got a big work, men, to do; we have got to have men of 

 force and experience in gaining knowledge of the other fellow's business 

 who can give us figures and statistics of the world^s markets, of our own 

 markets, and of general business conditions. It seems to me we finally 

 have got to reach the point where we will all get around the table, as 

 the saying is, and lay our cards on the table face up. We can not do 

 that now, because our cards haven't any spots on them. When we get 

 the spots, we can go with the other classes of business and make them 

 come out in the open. 



We are not keeping our figures under a bushel. Maybe we have 

 been too communicative about our business; maybe we have let the other 

 fellows find out too easily. They know all about it, but we don't know 

 about their business, and that is the big job, it seems to me, for the 

 Farm Bureau Federation, getting those figures, and finally developing 

 a plan to take care of and control the marketing of the products that we 

 raise. We produce them, and why haven't we a right to market them? 

 The other fellow markets his products and he fixes the price that he 

 gets for it. You know the old saying, "What goes up must come down." 

 I guess that is absolutely true. The question is, how high the thing is 



