I am honored to be here today not as a Senator from an Eastern urban state, but as a Senator of the United States – as one whose travels and studies have convinced him that there can be no prosperity in the city without prosperity on the farm. I will say to you what I said last fall in Massachusetts, when my opponent was denouncing me for voting to freeze farm price supports in 1957, and for voting against the Republican parity-wrecking bill of 1958. I will say that this is – and must be now as never before – a united land. This is no time to be telling the farmers that workers are to blame for their high costs – this I no time to be telling consumers that farmers are to blame for their high costs – this is no time to be pitting dairy farmers against corn farmers and Massachusetts against Iowa.
For we in Massachusetts can sell you shirts and fish and washing machines only when you have the farm income to pay for them. We can prosper in our factories only when you prosper on your farms – for "A rising tide lifts all the boats."
When more than four million people – farmers and their families – are driven from the farm under this Administration and go to the city to compete for jobs or go on relief – when farm purchasing power drops nearly $4 billion in 6 years – the effects are felt in every town and city in this state – and eventually in the whole country. We feel it in Massachusetts and in Boston.
I do not understand those who seek to preach disunity and division – setting city against country, East against West, neighbor against neighbor. I come today preaching instead the message of a common cause – the interdependence of all Americans.
Mr. Benson is free to do otherwise – but he is the first Secretary of Agriculture in our history who was ever sent out to campaign for votes in the city. His program may be to get the Government out of the farming business – but the farmers' program is to get Mr. Benson out of the governing business.
It is true, however, that Mr. Benson is the most remarkable Secretary of Agriculture in our history. He has spent more of the taxpayers' money than any previous Secretary of Agriculture – he has acquired more surpluses – he has cost the farmers more income despite rising food prices – and he has hired more Department employees than any Secretary of Agriculture in our history – and, most remarkable of all, he has been in office seven years and he still blames it all on the Democrats.
They say in Washington that even the President cannot afford to go back to the farm as long as Mr. Benson is Secretary of Agriculture.
Some of the facts in his record are spectacular:
--The Administration has talked of economy. Yet Mr. Benson will spend $71⁄2 billion this year – more than twice as much as his predecessor's largest farm budget.
--Mr. Benson has repeatedly made – particularly in election years – such statements as "agriculture seems to have turned the corner;" or "agriculture is now in a position to start its upward climb." But the facts of the matter are that the of non-farm workers, is continuing relatively to decline.
-- Mr. Benson said, in 1956 (an election year), that – due to his program of reducing price supports – "surpluses are declining and the storage problem has passed its peak." But the facts of the matter are that, as price supports were reduced by the Administration, surpluses mounted, until today they are at a record level of $9 billion – and still increasing.
--Mr. Benson continues to talk about this Administration getting us out of the storage business. Yet we find that after 61⁄2 years the cost of storage has quadrupled – from $300,000 per day to a staggering cost of $11⁄4 million every single day.
-- Seven years ago we were promised a Secretary of Agriculture who would reduce "swollen bureaucracy" in the Department of Agriculture. Today the Secretary of Agriculture has 81,000 people on his payroll – nearly 19,000 more than the day he took office. That is twelve new bureaucrats added every working day since January 20, 1953.
But these figures do not tell the whole story. The price support program has been under the direction of men who have denounced price supports as socialistic. The rural electrification program has been under the direction of an administrator who openly advocates higher REA interest rates. The problems of the low-income farm family were shunted aside for study to a Farmer's Home Administration which is unsympathetic to the program. The entire farm program is administered by a Secretary of Agriculture who believes that farmers unable to compete with corporation farms should leave their homesteads and other employment.
And that is why I cannot agree with those political experts who have been predicting that the farm belt will go Republican in the next election, if farm prices hold up. I cannot accept the premise upon which this prediction is based. It assumes that the farmer votes only according to the size of his pocket-book on election day. It assumes that he has no interest in basic agricultural policies, in the record of past performances, or in the economic outlook for the future. It assumes that the farmer cannot read the handwriting that is now on the wall, after Secretary Benson in last year's farm bill declared war on the concept of parity. It assumes that the farmer's vote is for sale to the highest bidder, without regard to the quality of leadership.
And it assumes, finally, that farmers are concerned only with farm problems – and that they know nothing or care nothing about the issues of war and peace, inflation or recession, public power, transportation, education, and all the rest. I think the farmer, like everyone else, want to look at the record – and his memory is long.
Mr. Benson has lots of statistics on his side. But there are other trends that do not show up in these tables and charts – more long-range, more disturbing trends than you and I see every day but do not translate into statistics. And one of the most disturbing of these trends – on which I want to comment particularly today – is the mass exodus of young people from our farms. In state after state, I have met farmers over 50 years old – but very, very few under the age of 29!
The young people just don't come back to the farm after school or the service. They move away to the city, or to other states. And while Mr. Benson may talk about reducing the farm population fore greater efficiency, I for one am worried about this trend. I am worried about what is going to happen to our soil when there are no younger people to take over the farm. What is going to happen to our rural churches and schools and small town stores that so depend on our young farmers and their growing families?
But, on the other hand, can we blame young people for being honestly worried about the whole future of agriculture. They can go to the city today and keep up with inflation. They can join unions and have some say about their wages. They can go into business and have some say about their prices. They can produce oil and have some say over production – or enter a profession and have voice in limiting the total number of those who enter it.
But if they stay on the farm, they have no real voice in their economic future. They can't influence their prices – they can’t change the weather – they can't single-handedly reduce surpluses or cut down on their yield. What they plant in May, they must harvest in September. And they have seen in recent years how prices fall, farm income falls, and parity – at the very same time that business prices and wages keep on going up.
And more importantly, the costs the farmer himself pays keep on going up. For there is no flexible sliding scale for his tax bill, or his mortgage payments, or his household expenses, or for the cost of replacing his machinery. The farmer is, after all, the only man in our economy who has to buy everything he buys at inflated retail – sell everything he sells at depressed wholesale – and pay the freight both ways.
And so, while farm income and prices go down under this Administration, the farmer's cost of living has gone up 10 percent. A four-plow tractor cost you over $1,000 more today than it did in 1953. Your doctor bill is on the average $57 higher than it was for the same medical care six years ago. It costs you more to finance a car, to buy a suit or even to write a letter than it did when this Administration took office. You have to sell, on the average, some 800 more bushels of corn to buy a plow than you would have had to sell to buy the same plow in 1952. It takes 1200 more bushels of wheat to buy the same combine – 90 more dozen eggs to buy the same electric washer – and 144 more hundredweights of milk to buy the same truck I am trying to get the Congress to raise the minimum wage to $1.25 and hour – but the average farmer, if you figure his profit in terms of wages, earns less than 50 cents an hour.
In short, say our younger people; it is not worth to take over a farm – more than most young people have in the bank in these times – just to get caught up in this endless treadmill trying to keep ahead, squeezed between higher costs and lower income, caught between mechanization and merger. They weren't encouraged or deceived when livestock prices were high and feed prices low. For they were bright enough to know that cheap feed sooner or later means cheap livestock – and broken livestock prices sooner or later mean broken farmers.
This is why our young people are leaving the farm today. They do not ask for any favored treatment, or want the government to do everything for them. But neither are they impressed with slogans about a free market – if it is only a freedom to go bankrupt. They do not trust those whose promises have been consistently broken – they do not listen to those who take credit for the rain but not for the drought. And they are not very optimistic after this Administration has spent billions of dollars on this problem in the last seven years and only succeeded in making it worse.
And even those farmers who are grateful for the size of this year’s crop and cash receipts remember that the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining – and the time to build a sound, long –range farm program is now.
I do not pretend to say that a Democratic Congress or Administration would have all the answers to all the problems. I do not agree with those who think that all we have to do is dismiss Mr. Benson and get a new Secretary of Agriculture. This problem is bigger and deeper than one man or even one administration. There are no quick, easy, painless remedies. On the contrary, I think the farmers themselves are getting tired of hearing from politicians in either camp about some new short-term expedient, a wonder drug aimed at treating some current symptom, instead of getting at the real problem. I do not intend to fill your ear with such promises today.
But, without attempting to speak for all Democrats – without attempting to write a farm bill here and now – and forgetting for the moment about parity indexes, acreage allotments, production payments, and all other techniques, let me say just this: that I believe any Democratic farm program would be based on the following six fundamental principles:
1. First, farm abundance should be treated as a blessing and not as a curse. There are still more than 1 billion 800 million people in other lands trying to get by on less than a subsistence diet. There are still tremendous possibilities for using food as a means of capital investment in underdeveloped countries, even in those that have no food shortages. There are still markets in Europe and elsewhere buying less of our foodstuffs today than they did 20 years ago. There are still 17 million Americans going to bed each night suffering from malnutrition. This country still stands 13th in terms of milk and dairy product consumption, and 5th in terms of meat consumption per person. And above all, there is still a fantastic population growth in this country. Next year's census-takers going from door to door, will find that we have become a nation of 180 million people. We will by the end of this century have doubled our population – we will have equaled the population of India in 1951, a year of critical food shortage in that teeming, famine-ridden, drought stricken country. And every year, as our population grows larger, we are losing some 400,000 acres of cropland by erosion and another one million acres to our growing cities, airports, reservoirs, highways and military reservations.
At the same time, the population of the world is multiplying faster than the world's capacity to produce food. Even if our entire food surplus this year were distributed around the world to all the hungry and all the needy, it would mean only the equivalent of approximately two teacups full of rice every 17 days for each hungry person.
In short, what Mr. Benson now complains about in terms of a food surplus could soon turn into a permanent food shortage. We dare not continue a course designed to abandon our soil, waste our water and cut back our cropland if we are to assure every American a minimum standard of nutrition for all time to come.
If we can but look at our farm abundance in this light, we see it as a national asset, not a liability – an asset which the Communists do not have and cannot obtain 2– a weapon more powerful for preserving the free world than any in our arsenal of armaments. Two specific programs are needed. We need a "food for peace" program that has real imagination and drive – that can use our surpluses as a powerful instrument for aiding economic development, strengthening alliances and helping less fortunate people in all parts of the globe. But we also need to do more for the needy and hungry here at home. And I hope that the Congress next year will take action on the bill which I have introduced directing a full-scale attack upon this problem—taking the job out of the hands of Mr. Benson, who has shown little interest in it, and giving it to the department responsible for those on pensions or public assistance. I believe in our programs of foreign aid and mutual security, but we must also take care of our own.
2. Secondly, any national farm program should be based on primarily on the promotion and preservation of the family farm. That is the basic unit here in Illinois – that is the way it must continue to be. We have no wish to become a nation of giant commercial corporation farms and absentee landlords. Our whole vitality as a nation depends on a contrary course. So let us beware of programs that aid most those who need it least – that encourage the big non-compliers by giving them a good support price anyway in election years. Our job is to look out for the family farmer – and we can count on the family farmer to look out for the future of our soil – and the future of our country.
3. Third, any future farm program should be run for farmers by farmers. Basic administration on the local level should be in the hands of farmer committees elected by farmers themselves. No bureaucrat, no economist or scientist, knows the needs and trends and variations of the local farm picture as well as the local farmers. On the national level, we need a Federal Farm Board comprised of leaders from the key commodity groups – a board which can explain the farmer's needs to the Administration and the Administration's hopes to the farmer. This would be a board made up of real farmers – and by farmers, I do not mean some of those whom Mr. Benson has appointed to high office – so called "farmers" who own one cow and ten banks. I mean those who contributed so much to the local administration of our farm programs in the past – and who can and should do so in the future.
4. Fourth, any Democratic farm program should encourage, not retard, the growth of the cooperative movement. Cooperatives can help the famer escape of the cost-price squeeze. They can give him some stability and bargaining power which he otherwise could not have. They can help both the farmer and the consumer by cutting this growing spread between the price at the farm and the price at the store. In those Scandinavian countries which have nationwide cooperative marketing arrangements, I am told the dairy farmer gets approximately 70 cents of every dollar spent by the consumer. Here it is 45 cents – or only a little more than half of that figure.
The Federal Government could aid these coops, and enable them to pool their financial resources for mutual benefits, in the same way that it has helped REA coops. It can offer technical assistance, financial credit and legal authority. It can eliminate state and local barriers to their expansion. But it will not prevent this Administration from trying to tax cooperatives and control their private financial obligations. As I said in my letter of protest to the Secretary of the Treasury last January, this bill would tax most heavily those cooperatives with inadequate cash resources who are least able to bear the tax.
5. Fifth, any future farm program must concentrate on cutting the farmer's costs. The high interest rate policy of this Administration has hurt the farmer looking for credit more than anyone else – and it has held him back even further by making it more difficult for him to buy more efficient machinery on the installment plan. The REA program of this Administration has not been one of promoting lower electric rates for our farm homes. It has done little or nothing about 300 farm families that still lack electricity – and little or nothing about the 40 percent of our farm families in this great electronic age who have no telephone service whatsoever. By cutting these costs – by keeping freight rates down and keeping them fair – a new administration can save just as much money for the farmer's pocket as higher farm prices would bring in.
6. Sixth and finally, any future farm program should assure our nation's farms of a fair share of the national net income. This does not mean that farm prices must always rise – but they should not be the only ones to fall. The farmer does not want to ration poverty – he wants to share abundance. He has made a tremendous capital investment in his farm – and he wants a comparable return on that investment. He puts in a long, hard work-week all year round – he wants comparable wages for his labor.
Economists predict that during the next two years wages will go up – businesses income will go up – our standard of living will go up. We cannot let the farmer down. A program based upon these six fundamental principles would, I am convinced, restore common sense and common justice to our farm policy. Only then will it be possible to gear national production to international need – to grow food for stomachs and not for storage – to support the farmer's prices and income at a level which will cover his costs and a reasonable profit, and at the same time substantially reduce the cost of this program to the American taxpayer.
I am convinced that the farmers of this country – particularly if they are given a major voice in shaping and administering this policy will support it and cooperate with it. This is not a matter of partisan politics – and it is not even a matter only of farm income. For our basic concern is not the interest of any single political party, or the interests of any single group in our economy. Our basic interest is the national interest – and dedicating ourselves to that objective, we can go forward with renewed faith in the future of our land.
Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files, Box 905, Folder: "Midwest Farm Conference, Springfield, Illinois, 24 October 1959." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.