EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VII 389 



Mr. Gumi : Did you know that there are several machines 

 that husk the corn and put it into the silo ? 



Professor Cochel : I have heard of them, but they have not 

 gotten out our way. Our farmers who are practicing that are 

 to a very large extent men who do not have silo capacity suffi- 

 cient to feed all their cattle thru the winter, and they fill their 

 silos two or three times. 



The president announced that the election of directors from 

 the even-numbered districts for the ensuing year would take 

 place after the banquet in the evening. 



The President. I now have the pleasure of introducing to 

 you Mr. Joseph P. Cotton, of Chicago, chief of the Meat Division 

 of the Food Administration, who will now address you. 



THE STOCKMAN AND THE FOOD ADMINISTRATION. 



I came out here to see you, and my trip is of very little use if it 

 merely consists in your seeing and listening to me. I want to have a 

 conference with you, and to get something from you, too. 



I suppose the first t'liing for me to do is to tell you more or less of 

 what my job is — what I have been doing and why I have been doing it. 

 I will be as brief as I can on that. 



In the first place, a Food Administration— this one or any other — is 

 a pure war bureau. It has no other objects or purposes except as a war 

 instrument, and its work is essentially two-fold: First, to see that the 

 food is produced, and, second, to see that that food goes to the consumer 

 and is distributed as cheaply as may be. If we fail in the production of 

 the food, we can never get over that failure. 



One or two other generalities. With the withdrawal of a large num- 

 ber of men from the productive industry, and with the spending of very 

 large sums of money on war, there has come what we all know as the 

 high cost of living, that is, an unprecedented demand for food and meat 

 stuffs, and unprecedentedly high prices. No man, no government, is 

 strong enough to just turn the clock back and put back the prices to 

 where they were before the war, and any government or food administra- 

 tion, or anybody else who tries it, will simply fail and be broken. It 

 can't be done, and we are not trying to do it. What the Food Administra- 

 tion is trying to do is to see that the food is produced, that the profit 

 made on it is a reasonable profit, that after it is produced it goes to the 

 manufacturer or distributer, and that he operates on a reasonable profit, 

 and that it goes to the consumer with no other profits but these reasonable 

 ones. That means eliminating just as far as po?sible speculative profits 

 and profits that come from hoarding and other unfair methods — and those 

 profits we all know have been pretty big. 



So much for a general statement. Now about my job. The first end 

 of it was to look after the packers. You know them probably better 

 than I do During the war the packers have had profits that arose not 



