Remarks at the First Meeting of the Federal Farm Board.

I HAVE no extended statement to make to the Federal Farm Board as to its duties. The wide authority and the splendid resources placed at your disposal are well known.

I am deeply impressed with the responsibilities which lie before you. Your fundamental purpose must be to determine the fact and to find solution to a multitude of agricultural problems, among them to more nearly adjust production to need; to create permanent business [p.221] institutions for marketing which, owned and controlled by the farmers, shall be so wisely devised and soundly founded and well managed that they, by effecting economies and giving such stability, will grow in strength over the years to come. Through these efforts we may establish to the farmer an equal opportunity in our economic system with other industry.

I know there is not a thinking farmer who does not realize that all this cannot be accomplished by a magic wand or an overnight action. Real institutions are not built that way. If we are to succeed it will be by strengthening the foundations and the initiative which we already have in farm organizations, and building steadily upon them with the constant thought that we are building not for the present only but for next year and the next decade.

In selecting this Board I have sought for suggestions from the many scores of farmers' cooperatives and other organizations and yours were the names most universally commended; you are thus in a sense the representatives of organized agriculture itself. I congratulate each of you upon the distinction of his colleagues and by your appointment I invest you with responsibility, authority, and resources such as have never before been conferred by our Government in assistance to any industry.