Proclamation 3830—National Farm Safety Week, 1968

When our Nation was very young, a man wrested a living from the land as best he could. His tools were primitive, his productivity low. He was fortunate if he could feed his family and have a little left over to sell.

Today the technological revolution has made the American farmer food supplier to the world. His produce feeds his family, his neighbors, his countrymen, and thousands abroad. Yet that same revolution has brought unforeseen dangers. Modern farming is a complex and highly skilled profession. It is also a hazardous one.

Agriculture currently ranks third among our industries in accidental death rate. Thousands of farm residents are killed every year in accidents. More than 700,000 others are disabled. The cost to the Nation in dollars is almost $2 billion. The cost in anguish is incalculable.

This shameful waste must stop. It will stop when safety has become the conscious concern of all who work to produce America's great agricultural abundance.

Now, Therefore, I, Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States of America, do hereby call on the people of the Nation to observe the week of July 21, 1968, as National Farm Safety Week. I urge all persons who live on farms, and those persons and groups serving or allied with agriculture, to intensify their individual efforts to curtail and halt accidents where and when possible at work, in homes, at recreation, and on public roads.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-sixth day of February, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, and of the independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety second.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON