75-03-B1
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Farm Facts[edit]
Transcript[edit]Some of the biggest gamblers in America wouldn't know the difference between a roulette table and spin the bottle, but they're gamblers nevertheless. I'll be right back. Not too long ago I was a guest speaker in Las Vegas to a national agriculture group. Some of the regular patrons of Las Vegas must have thought the farm visitors were a little out of place, but I have news for them. A farmer of any kind is in a business that makes a crap table or a roulette wheel look like a guaranteed annual income. Year in and year out the farmer bets his whole role against weather insects plant and animal diseases and a supply and demand system in which he's flying blind. He has no way of knowing whether everyone else is raising the same crop he decided to plant or if he'll have the market to himself. It can rain too early, or too late, or too much, or too little and any one of these can make him a loser. Some years back a Secretary of Agriculture was getting around the country hearing at first hand the farmer's views one of them was giving him a rough time with his complaints. The secretary sneaked a hasty look at his briefing papers and said, "Well, now, wait a minute you didn't have it all that bad last year you got 29 inches of rain." The farmer says, "Yeah I remember the night it happened." A couple of years back when beef prices shot up, the cattle growers took a lot of abuse they didn't deserve. For one thing there'd been virtually no increase in beef prices at the grower level for more than a decade. There had been a sizable hike in the price of feed, the grain that puts on that finishing growth in the feedlot, and it takes about four and a half pounds of grain to make one pound of meat. Arithmetic is a very exact science and when the grain price per pound is higher than beef per pound, how do you come out in that four and a half to one ratio of feed to meat? And just to top things off in that year of high priced meat we had winter storms in the western plains that killed thousands of animals. In one storm alone the toll was a hundred million dollars worth. That was also the year the workers in the packing houses struck for higher pay. The housewife was angry about the high price of meat but was she angry at the right people. March 24th has been named Agriculture Day in recognition, not only of the farmer's responsibilities, but of what agriculture means to all of us. It's true that almost everything starts on a farm. The things we eat and wear, but also chemicals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, soap and even ink. Less than five percent of our people provide for ninety five percent and have enough left over to export to other countries. You've probably read about the disappearing family farm replaced by the huge corporation farm. Yet less than one tenth of one percent of our 2.9 million farms are corporate. In the last few decades the American farmer has led America and the world in a technological revolution. His increase in productivity is a miracle of the 20th century. In just the last 10 years, his production has gone up 20 percent while acreage farmed has gone down six percent. The harvest from one out of every four acres is exported without that our balance of trade would be in a sorry state. One farmer grows food and fiber for fifty one of his fellow citizens and 4 out of 10 non-farm jobs are dependent on agriculture. Maybe on March 24th we should all decide, at least for the day, not to blame the farmer for the high price of food. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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