Franklin D. Roosevelt

Statement Suggesting Cooperation by Farmers in the Soil Conservation Program.

March 19, 1936

Three weeks ago, when I signed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, I said that this Administration had not abandoned and would not abandon the goal of equality for agriculture. I pointed out that although the Act is addressed primarily to the serious and long-neglected problem of soil conservation, the reestablishment and maintenance of farm income were also a major objective.

Today, as a national soil conservation program is being launched in accordance with the Act by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the need for protecting not only the soil, but also farm prices and income appears even greater than when the Act was adopted.

This fact has been made evident by the reports of farmers' intentions to plant compiled by the Department of Agriculture. These reports, announced a few days ago, showed that farmers were planning an increase of 19 percent in their acreage of spring wheat, 6 percent in their acreage of corn, 11 percent in rice, 9 percent in tobacco, and 8 percent in peanuts. These reports are not compiled for cotton, but unofficial reports circulated in the trade and recorded in the press have indicated an increase of around 15 percent in cotton acreage.

In conformance with the Supreme Court's decision, the farmers' production control programs have been stopped, but their chronic surplus problem goes on. Export markets for wheat, pork, and tobacco, lost following the enactment of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, have only in small part been regained. The huge carryover of cotton which was accumulated during the years leading up to 1933 has not yet been reduced to normal. Although reduction has progressed well for three years, the carryover is still probably twice as big as it ought to be for the maintenance of a reasonable price in the future.

Although the production control programs have been stopped, farmers are not entirely at the mercy of unbridled competition with their fellow producers, as they were in the years preceding 1933. The new farm act provides for financial assistance by the Government to those farmers who, heeding the warnings contained in the intentions-to-plant reports, wish to shift from the production of unneeded surpluses of soil-depleting crops to the production of needed soil-building crops.

I believe that farmers will find the new program is in the national interest, and in their own individual interest, too. Every farmer takes pride in the productivity of his soil. Every farmer wants to hand on his farm to his children in better shape than he found it. The conservation payments offered by the Government in accordance with the Act will help him to do this.

If farmers for any reason should fail to take advantage of the new Act, and especially if they should carry out their intentions as indicated in the Department of Agriculture reports, the consequent excessive production of such cash crops as cotton and wheat and tobacco might result once more in the wrecking of their prices and the mining of their soil. But if the farmers, in operating the soil conservation program, display the same energy and cooperative spirit which they showed in making the production control programs work, they will go far to protect both their soil and their income. This is an appeal to all farmers to cooperate for their own and the national good to help in preventing excessive production.

Congress has gone as far as it could within judicial limitations to enable farmers to keep the gains they have made in the last three years and to permit their buying power to continue the powerful upward lift it has given to national recovery.

I hope that farmers will not complete their plans for this year's crops until they have had opportunity to study the new Act and that all those to whom it offers advantages may cooperate in the program now being launched.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Statement Suggesting Cooperation by Farmers in the Soil Conservation Program. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208688

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