Remarks Recorded for a Television Program on the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber.

EVERY MAN enjoys the chance to talk about something that he knows something about. I think that is even true of Presidents.

Agriculture is a subject that has been very close to my heart all of my life. My roots have always been in rural America. That is why I am very happy today to have this chance to remind my fellow Americans of the debt that I think we owe to the American farmer and to his family.

Our farmers have made us the healthiest and the best fed people in all the world, throughout all history. They have given us much more than just the necessities of life. Every day, they bring us a harvest of great quantity and rare quality--and they do it at a cost that the average housewife can easily afford.

Our farmers have shared the richness of their skill and the earth with a hungry world. They have literally saved millions of people from starvation.

American farm products are vital to our own economic health, and to our strength in the markets of the world. They form the largest part of America's international trade.

American farming techniques today are miracles that create many of the blessings of our abundance. Their efficiency is the envy and the hope of so many nations that seek peaceful and stable development.

Yes, the American farmer has given a great deal to his nation, and he has given much to the world. And, yet, he gets the short end of the stick in return.

Far too often, he gets less than his fair share of the prosperity that he has helped create and that he supports. He gets up at daylight, he works all day long, he comes home hot or cold and tired to his family-and he finally finds that he has been shortchanged for his labors. So instead of going to bed, he sits up with his wife, wrestling with unpaid bills and how to meet the payments.

These things are pretty discouraging. The bills are hard to pay because the farmer himself is underpaid. Now, we must do better by our farmers. We owe it to them to be fair. We owe it to ourselves to be just--and I am not sure that we have been either.

All of us--the college people, the government people, the city people, the farm people-the American people, if you please-should join in conscience and bring new life to the American farmer and to our agricultural programs.

Two years ago, I, as the President of the American people, established the National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber to try to help us achieve that. We sought and secured 30 outstanding Americans to serve on this Commission. Dean Sherwood Berg, of the Institute of Agriculture at the great University of Minnesota, acted as Chairman.

The President asked this Commission to take a good, hard, long look at our agricultural and our foreign trade policies. I now have their findings and recommendations-and I am encouraged.

Their report will, I hope, move us forward to the goal we seek--giving a fair income to our farmers for their labors--and giving a fair return to the investor in our food and fiber industries.

Now, that is our common responsibility as Americans. We ought to live up to that responsibility. We haven't lived up to it. And we have got to do something about it. So I am very grateful to every member of this Commission for helping us to recognize our debt to our farmers--for showing us how we must and how we may repay the farmer-in full.

Now, I know that we don't have all the final answers. I know that many of them are around the corner that we haven't turned. But I do believe they will not come easy for any of us; and I do think that I ought to tell you this: The search is underway. The search is not going to stop. We have the very best men that the President can find doing the searching.

"Farming," it has been said, "looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you are sitting back in an air-conditioned room a thousand miles from a cornfield."

This Commission has not been looking at farming from an air-conditioned room with a pencil over the ear a thousand miles from the farm. From the very first, this Commission understood that there were no easy answers to this problem. If there were, it would have been given to the 35 Presidents who preceded me. This Commission has rejected the extremes of pessimism and optimism.

Our farmers generally have a good deal of pessimism in their system and they have a good deal of justification for it. Now and then we have an adventurer and one that is overly optimistic.

But this Commission has looked instead, not for pessimism or optimism, but for constructive ideas--for fair proposals for what they believe would be reasonable and yet realistic solutions.

Too often we have had idealistic people that had their eyes on the stars but did not keep their feet on the ground.

I hope, and I believe, that the Commission has succeeded in its general purpose. I believe we are all now better equipped in our national purpose.

So I am very grateful to all of you who believe as I believe--that there is a better day coming for the American farmer, particularly if the farmer himself will unite and will give some of his good hard-headed thinking to this subject.

I think that we need not wait until the cows come home to see this day come. Let's get with it. Let's go at it. Let's unite and put our shoulders to the wheel.

In adversity, you know, the family comes a little closer together. Now, things are not so bad as to say we are all living in adversity. But we do need to better conditions on the farms. If we don't, people are not going to be on the farms any more. There are too few there now. One of the reasons for all of our problems is that so many have left the farms because they were forced to.

So let's try to put aside our prejudices and our selfishness and our individual viewpoints and try to find an area of agreement where the farmers of the Nation can come together and unite in a common cause--a cause of moving forward for a better world for those who till the soil, and a better world for all of those who live in it.
Thank you very much.