612 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



not. Suppose we never do, we will have sent our surplus stuff out of 

 this country and let them eat it, and when they get their stomachs full 

 they will be able to get to work, which they are not able to do now if 

 they are starving; and we will let those fellows gef back on the.r feet 

 and we will get rid of our surplus and ourselves get more for our stuff 

 at home, and then we will be on a better basis all around. 



That is my theory, and whether it is sound or not, I hope this resolu- 

 tion will get thru the house and go to those fellows who are in authority 

 down in the cabinet and put the proposition up to them, and then we will 

 know exactly who is to blame for it if that War Finance Corporation 

 doesn't go to work. 



There is also a large corporation being organized under the Edge 

 act, but I have no faith in that giving us any relief, because those bank- 

 ers are going to get some security, are going to issue those credentials, 

 and they are going to increase the power of that $100,000,000 to $1,000,- 

 000,000; but they aren't going to look much to the agricultural products 

 to ship abroad, because if they ship those fellows bread and butter over 

 there, the Austrians and Germans, and those big, husky fellows that are 

 starving now, they will eat that stuff up and there won't be anything to 

 bank their securities against. The things that that corporation will do, 

 I think, unless you watch it mighty close, is to send cultivators and reapers 

 and plows and tractors and motors and manufacturing products over 

 there, and set those fellows to work on agricultural production. It seems 

 to me we want to look into that matter very carefully. Mr. Cunningham, 

 secretary of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, attended a meeting of 

 the committee that discussed the formation of this corporation, and he 

 tells me that in the resolution that the committee brought out there 

 wasn't one word about agriculture, and Mr. Cunningham insisted that 

 agriculture should also be inserted in there, and after calling their 

 attention very pointedly to the matter they did write agriculture in there. 

 Now, that never w^ould have been done if we hadn't had a Farm Bureau 

 Federation; they never would have thought of it, probably, so you see 

 that while we may not be doing so many big things or getting such large 

 results at once, we are having some influence. 



But I want to get down to this point of foreign trade. Do you know 

 that there are something like 42-5,000,000 head of cattle in the world? 

 British India has something like 90,000,000 head of cattle. Out of 425,- 

 000,000 head the United States has 57,000,000. I think that has increased 

 some — that was six years ago, the only world statistics that we have com- 

 plete, but I think since the war has closed it has been determined that 

 the increase in cattle in the United States has been about 12,000,000 

 during that six-year period, so that the United States should have pos- 

 sibly 61,000,000 head, but out of that bunch we have something like 

 260,000,000 head of cattle that are not in the United States. We get 

 to thinking about Iowa and we get the idea in our heads that Iowa is pro- 

 ducing about all the cattle that there are. We are producing a lot of 

 them, but there are a lot of them somewhere else. 



Look at the hog industry. We have in the United States something 

 like 73,000,000 head of hogs. Outside of a few pig-pens in England and 



