Remarks to Delegates to the Second Annual Conference on Farm Policy and Rural Life.

Secretary Freeman, my fellow citizens:

This is such a lovely evening that I thought I would leave my corral long enough to come over here and visit with you briefly. That seems to be getting harder to do every day that goes by.

Every day there seem to be more and more people who are running around the country trying to figure out a way to keep me down on the farm.

It is always a great pleasure for me to meet with my fellow farmers, especially as talented a group as this. America has produced great dairy farmers, great cattlemen, and the best wheat growers on earth, but very few of them can equal you here today. For I want you to know and the world to know that you have mastered the hardest skill of all: You know how to make hay in Washington.

Secretary Rusk is having a meeting with some wise men in the next room. He met me at the elevator as I came in. And he said, "Mr. President, I am turning over the State Department to a group of farmers tonight."

I said, "Well, I just hope they are not all from Arkansas, Dean."

Daniel Webster used to say that he admired farmers because they were the founders of human civilization. Without the man who tills the soil, nothing else is really possible because he feeds us, he clothes us, and upon occasions he even gives us good advice.

It has been my experience as a rancher that this advice is not always heeded. And you would be amazed how little it helps sometimes to be President of the United States. They just still don't listen.

I hope that someone was listening a few weeks ago when we sent to Congress our message on the farmer and on rural America.

So many times when I have read these reports on our cities--and I have seen the wreckage on the television film at night of our towns burning--I have just wondered if we could have just spent a small proportion of the money that we are going to have to spend now in those cities, in helping to keep the people living on the farm, how much better it would be.

We offered some advice in that message to the Congress that was designed to give the American farmer the kind of parity that really counts: parity of the pocketbook.

We advised extending the supply management programs of the Food and Agriculture Act of 1965 with permanent authority because the farmer just should not be asked to grow more than the market can possibly take at a fair price.

We advised continuing the direct payment programs which are the difference between the profit and loss for many farmers every year.

We advised extending the Food for Freedom Act for an additional 3 years because it is right and because it is good business for our farmers to build new markets in new lands.

We advised creating a national food bank, a security reserve of wheat, feed grains, and soybeans, which would give the farmer higher prices, which we think would protect the consumer from food scarcity and which would provide our great country with a cushion of emergency food at all times.

We advised Congress to help us find ways to give the farmer more bargaining power in the marketplace. Everyone has power in the marketplace except the farmer.

We advised a whole range of programs to bring parity of opportunity to rural America-rural jobs, better credit, decent housing, adequate diets, and above all, the chance to lead a full, productive, and free life.

I don't know how much of that advice is going to be taken or how much is going to be heeded, if any.

But I do believe, and I do promise you tonight that we have given that advice and we do intend to stand here as long as we can stand here and fight for what we think is right--and that is right.

You just might want, perhaps, to add a few comments of your own.

I have a feeling that the Congress would welcome you with open ears if you should observe to them that the time is near when Americans should try to spend some time preparing for themselves, trying to make life better for their own people--although we are very interested in all parts of the world-and maybe adjust our differences, bend a little bit, and accommodate ourselves to our neighbor's view some.

We just don't always enjoy the luxury of finding out all of the things that are wrong with us and talking about them all the time because pretty soon an average observer looking at our country wouldn't conclude what we know. From what he reads and from what he hears, he would think it is a pretty bad place.

I may have been in Washington too long. I may have had too much faith. But somehow or other, I really think that this is the best land in all the world, with the best system in all the world, where the people are the best fed, the best housed, the best clothed, and the best educated and have the most freedom of any citizen that lives under any other flag.

Now, that is not enough. We are going to make it better. We are going to continue to move from here. We are going to continue to improve on what we have.

But we are not going to spend much time talking about what is wrong. We are going to talk about what is right and why we have got to have it.

With your help and with God's help, we will get somebody to listen to this advice. And we will have a program that we hope-we hope--will keep them down on the farm.

Thank you very much.