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Remarks to the United States Department of Agriculture Corn Blight Conference at Beltsville, Maryland.

December 17, 1970

Mr. Secretary, and all of the distinguished guests here at Beltsville:

In checking the record I found that this is the first visit that a President of the United States has made to Beltsville since President Eisenhower was here in 1954. And consequently, I feel particularly privileged to have the opportunity to see this very famous agricultural research installation and also to meet, at the same time, with a group of distinguished farm leaders from across the Nation on a subject of enormous importance, not only to the people of the United States in terms of corn and its production--and we know what that means but also, in terms of what it will do for people throughout the world who might have a similar problem and where we, of course, have been so generous in sharing our knowledge with others in terms of helping them with their agricultural problems.

I am going to take, I understand, a brief tour of the facility after our remarks here. But I thought that this particular occasion was one that gave me an opportunity to say some things that I have been wanting to say to leaders in the agricultural community about the Department of Agriculture, about our Secretary of Agriculture and his colleagues, and also about the American farmer, the agricultural community generally, and what we in America, all of us, owe to American agriculture.

First, with regard to the Secretary of Agriculture, he has spoken generously about the support he has had from the President and the White House on the policies that he has recommended. When he took this position I told him that it was very difficult to be a popular Secretary of Agriculture. I told him that Congressmen and Senators, Democrats and Republicans, for years got elected by running against the Secretary of Agriculture; and that I hoped he avoided that.

Now, there are many interpretations of the last elections, but I don't know of anybody that ran against Secretary Hardin. So, I congratulate him on that particular point.

I want to say, too, though, that when I did appoint him, I wanted a man who would speak for the farmers and for American agriculture to the White House rather than the other way around. He has done that. Beneath that very pleasant and disarming exterior of his is a very strong and persuasive and determined mind. And in these matters that come before us and the high decisions that have to be made at the White House with the legislative leaders, with the Cabinet, on the budget and other matters, I can assure you that agriculture has a very strong advocate.

I have appreciated that fact, because I do not want those who simply are there to parrot the views that we may have developed in advance. I want somebody there that will represent this community and represent it well. He has done that.

I don't mean to suggest by that that all of the decisions that we have made in this administration meet with unanimous approval by the leaders of American agriculture. I found that when we were trying to develop a farm bill this year that it was very difficult to find any common ground of agreement.

There were certainly no partisan lines that divided Democrats from Republicans on agricultural issues. As you know, generally speaking, it's a question of the corn people and the wheat people and the cotton people and the peanut people and the people that don't have subsidies and the people that do and so on down the line.

And so the problem is to find a piece of farm legislation that is in the best interests of American agriculture and, at the same time, will serve the interests of the country generally.

This farm bill,1 would have to candidly admit, did not meet with as much approval from all of the various agricultural organizations as I would like. And I read the publications. I know what some have been saying about the farm legislation. The Secretary has told me a little about it, too.

1 See Item 443.

I do want you to know, however, we do think it's an improvement. We do think that it's a good start in the right direction. We hope that you will work with us in implementing the new farm legislation, and we're open to new suggestions as to how we can do better in the future. This is said to you quite candidly and quite honestly, for a reason that I will now develop with regard to what the American people owe to American agriculture generally.

Some of you may have noted that in a recent speech to the National Association of Manufacturers in New York I referred to a new Commission on Productivity that we have set up in the United States. This Commission has not received as much publicity as some more spectacular organizations of that type might receive, but it is a very high-powered group, high-powered in the sense that it has representatives of labor, of management, of the general public, from the scientific community, and it comes from all over the United States.

That Commission has had several meetings since I established it several months ago. And as I sat there with these top leaders of American industry and American labor and the American academic community--American agriculture was also represented--a very significant point was made, not only in the first meeting but in the second and in the third. On every occasion, it is this: That that area of the American economy that has had the greatest growth in productivity and that has the highest productivity per man-hour, anyway you want to rate it, is American agriculture.

The point being made that we think of industry, and this is a great industrial country; we think of services, and we do have many areas where we have led the world in the field of services but whether it's in the field of industry or the field of services, there is nothing in the United States that even approaches the growth in productivity of American agriculture.

This is a great record. It's a record that is due, of course, to the fact that we have had good people on the land, farmers. A farmer these days, of course, is much more than a farmer. He's a scientist, and he's a technician, he's a businessman, he's a man who knows how to market, he has to be one who can be able to handle this complex business that we call agribusiness in many parts of the country. But we also owe a very great debt to those in the Department of Agriculture, those that have given their lives to this area of research, this area of developing the capability to produce more from the land and to produce it at less cost and with less people.

And so, once I heard this particular fact brought home, that American agriculture was that area of the American economy that had had the greatest growth in productivity and that was the most productive area of any part of this Nation, I then checked a little further. And I had been hearing and some of you have been reading, not in the agricultural press, but in the press generally, about the costs of our farm program.

And so I found that when we checked to see the percentage of family income that goes into food, that at the present time, the American housewife pays a smaller percentage of her family income for food in America than she's ever paid in our history; and second, that the American housewife in this country, that is by far the best fed country in the world in terms of what the American people have available on their table and in their stores and through their markets--but in spite of that fact, that the American housewife today pays a smaller percentage of her family income for food than the housewife in any other country of the world.

What does this mean? Well, it means that despite all the problems that we hear about American agriculture, and despite the condemnation we hear of farm programs, that American agriculture, and particularly the American farmer, must be doing something right. It means also that the Nation owes American agriculture a very great debt, a very great debt which perhaps has not been adequately reflected in agricultural income.

I am not happy about the fact that agricultural income has not been at the rates that it should have been over these past few years. I think that the farmer, as I said during the campaign of 1968 and in campaigns before that, deserves a fair share of the Nation's increasing wealth and its increasing productivity, due to the fact that American agriculture is so productive.

But I do think that it is important that, representing all of the American people in this Christmas season, that I am able to say to the farmers of America, through this very distinguished group, that we are aware of the great debt that we owe to the farmers. We are aware of the great debt we owe to agriculture. We are aware of the great debt that we owe to all of those who work in this particular field.

We are the best fed people, but at the lowest cost, the lowest percentage of our income, of any country in the world. And for that, we are most grateful.

That brings me finally to another point that particularly occurs since I met today with the British Prime Minister. And we talked about problems around the world. And one of the problems we discussed was the problem of hunger in the world. We have problems of hunger in this country, as you are aware, and there are problems of hunger in all countries, rich and poor, around the world.

But the problems of hunger in this country, of course, are, in terms of magnitude, nothing compared to what the problems are in countries that simply do not have the enormous productivity that we have.

And so, as we look around the world, and as we think of the future of the world and what's going to happen, we realize how much American agriculture can contribute. I speak not simply of those foods that we may export to other countries-and we're very interested in those export markets. And believe me, nobody's fighting as hard for those markets as Cliff Hardin is fighting. After he returns from each trip, he goes over to the State Department and then he comes to the White House. And sometimes he wins, I might say. We hope that he wins a little more often in the future. But, be that as it may, I think that we should recognize that in terms of the long-range prospect, that American agriculture is doing more, far more, than simply seeing to it that we in America have the benefit of an enormously rich society in terms of what we can put on our tables at Christmastime or Thanksgiving or, for that matter, any day of the week---we owe it to the productivity of American agriculture. But also, in terms of the future of the world, what we have learned in America and the knowledge that we are able to share with other people may make a difference in these next 10, 15, 25 years, a difference as to whether millions of people all over the world will grow up without enough to eat at all or whether they may have a better chance, not as good a chance as our people have, but at least a better chance than they would otherwise have to survive.

And I leave on that particular note. I leave on it because I think it is well for us in this Christmas season to recognize that this is one time of the year when we naturally think of our own private concerns and the problems that we have of meeting our family budgets and the like, but also it is a time when we think of what we can do and what we are doing to help other people, to help other people in the United States, and what we are doing to help other people in this world, to make it a more peaceful world, to make it a better world, to make it a world in which children don't go hungry, not here, not anyplace else.

That's an ideal people could never dream of before. It is an ideal that perhaps we can reach for now. But if we can reach for it, we will be standing on a little bit higher plateau, perhaps a considerably higher plateau from which to reach, because American agriculture has built that plateau, built it by its productivity, by its devotion, by its dedication in developing the most productive economy in terms of agriculture ever in the history of the world, let alone the history of the United States.

And so, I express my deep appreciation to the representatives of agriculture for coming to this particular meeting, dealing with this problem, which is only a small part of the problem in a way, a small part of the problem, but symbolizes it all.

There was a time, I suppose not 10, maybe not 25 years ago, we should say, there was a time 25 years ago when corn blight came we might not have had enough in storage to take up the slack, but beyond that, we might not have developed the capability to deal with the problem.

But now we not only have the amount in storage to take up the gap, but we also, as I understand, due to the enormous facilities of research and the brains and the overtime and the genius that have gone into it, we are finding an answer to this problem.

And that means that in the future we will be able to deal with it more effectively. It means, also, we can share this knowledge with other people throughout the world.

So with that, thank you to all the farmers of America and through you, to the farmers of America, thank you for making it possible for us in America to have a much better table on Christmas Day for that Christmas dinner or that Christmas lunch, whichever it happens to be, and to have it at lower cost in terms of our total income than we've ever had it before and at lower cost in terms of our total income than any other people in the world can enjoy.

Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 3:32 p.m. to some 100 representatives of farm organizations attending the conference at the Agricultural Research Center.

Richard Nixon, Remarks to the United States Department of Agriculture Corn Blight Conference at Beltsville, Maryland. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/240779

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