Our farm people are not sharing as they should in the general prosperity.
They alone of all major groups have seen their incomes decline rather than
rise. They are caught between two millstones--rising production costs and
declining prices. Such harm to a part of the national economy so vitally
important to everyone is of great concern to us all. No other resource is
so indispensable as the land that feeds and clothes us. No group is more
fundamental to our national life than our farmers.
In successful prosecution of the war, the nation called for the utmost
effort of its farmers. Their response was superb, their contribution
unsurpassed. Farmers are not now to be blamed for the mountainous,
price-depressing surpluses produced in response to wartime policies and
laws that were too long continued. War markets are not the markets of
peacetime. Failure to recognize that basic fact by a timely adjustment of
wartime legislation brought its inevitable result in peacetime--surpluses,
lower prices and lower incomes for our farmers.
The dimensions of government responsibility are as broad and complex as the
farm problem itself. We are here concerned not only with our essential
continuing supplies of food and fiber, but also with a way of life. Both
are indispensable to the well-being and strength of the nation.
Consideration of these matters must be above and beyond politics. Our
national farm policy, so vital to the welfare of farm people and all of us,
must not become a field for political warfare. Too much is at stake.
Our farm people expect of us, who have responsibility for their government,
understanding of their problems and the will to help solve them. Our
objective must be to help bring production into balance with existing and
new markets, at prices that yield farmers a return for their work in line
with what other Americans get.
To reach this goal, deep-seated problems must be subjected to a stepped-up
attack. There is no single easy solution. Rather, there must be a
many-sided assault on the stubborn problems of surpluses, prices, costs,
and markets; and a steady, persistent, imaginative advance in the
relationship between farmers and their government.
In a few days, by special message, I shall lay before the Congress my
detailed recommendations for new steps that should be taken promptly to
speed the transition in agriculture and thus assist our farmers to achieve
their fair share of the national income.
Basic to this program will be a new attack on the surplus problem-for even
the best-conceived farm program cannot work under a multi-billion dollar
weight of accumulated stocks.
I shall urge authorization of a soil bank program to alleviate the problem
of diverted acres and an overexpanded agricultural plant. This will include
an acreage reserve to reduce current and accumulated surpluses of crops in
most serious difficulty, and a conservation reserve to achieve other needed
adjustments in the use of agricultural resources. I shall urge measures to
strengthen our surplus disposal activities.
I shall propose measures to strengthen individual commodity programs, to
remove controls where possible, to reduce carryovers, and to stop further
accumulations of surpluses. I shall ask the Congress to provide substantial
new funds for an expanded drive on the research front, to develop new
markets, new crops, and new uses. The Rural Development Program to better
the lot of low-income farm families deserves full Congressional support.
The Great Plains Program must go forward vigorously. Advances on these and
other fronts will pull down the pricedepressing surpluses and raise farm
income.
In this time of testing in agriculture, we should all together, regardless
of party, carry forward resolutely with a sound and forward looking program
on which farm people may confidently depend, now and for years to come.
I shall briefly mention four other subjects directly related to the
well-being of the economy, preliminary to their fuller discussion in the
Economic Report and later communications.