304 Presidential Addresses 



rigid inspection of all meats that enter into inter 

 state commerce. Thirty-eight million carcasses 

 were inspected during the last fiscal year. Our 

 stock growers sell forty-five million dollars' worth 

 of live stock annually, and these animals must be 

 kept healthy or else our people will lose their trade. 

 Our export of plant products to foreign countries 

 amounts to over six hundred million dollars a year, 

 and there is no branch of its work to which the De 

 partment of Agriculture devotes more care. Thus 

 the Department has been successfully introducing a 

 macaroni wheat from the headwaters of the Volga, 

 which grows successfully in ten inches of rainfall, 

 and by this means wheat growing has been suc 

 cessfully extended westward into the semi-arid re 

 gion. Two million bushels of this wheat were 

 grown last year ; and being suited to . dry condi 

 tions it can be used for forage as well as for food 

 for man. 



The Department of Agriculture has been helping 

 our fruit men to establish markets abroad by study 

 ing methods of fruit preservation through refrigera 

 tion and through methods of handling and packing. 

 On the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas, thanks 

 to the Department of Agriculture, a rice suitable to 

 the region was imported from the Orient and the 

 rice crop is now practically equal to our needs in 

 this country, whereas a few years ago it supplied but 

 one-fourth of them. The most important of our 

 farm products is the grass crop; and to show what 

 has been done with grasses, I need only allude to the 



