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Ladies and gentlemen, the states shall receive the benediction of the right Reverend Admiral

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Sheehy, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Cedar Rapids.

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Thy blessing, Almighty.

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American farmers have the know-how to improve agricultural production in distant lands.

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Freedom of choice is the American way. It is the enlightened way.

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So our farmers should always be free to make their own decisions and to use free markets

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to reflect the wishes of the producers and the consumers.

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Now due largely to these practices of freedom, farm prices are going up.

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Generally those prices are higher now than when rigid price supports were last in effect.

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Realized net farm income is up 20% over last year.

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Per capita farm income is the highest ever.

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Gross farm income will set a new record this year.

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The National Corn Picking Contest is the machine-age answer to the old corn husking contests

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because with the development of those newfangled corn picking machines, few people really knew how to husk corn anymore.

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The contest gives state agricultural college officials more than a hundred farm equipment manufacturers

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and the farmers a chance to get together.

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The estimate is that there are a hundred thousand people here today.

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The contest also gives candidates for political office a chance to make speeches.

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President Eisenhower calls this a non-political visit, but everything else here is political.

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The grounds are full of political candidates and political posters.

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The president's talk, indirectly at least, was a defense of Secretary Benson and administration farm policies.

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One speaker an hour before the president was Democratic Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts

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who spent most of his time criticizing Secretary Benson.

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In fact, the first thing the president did upon his arrival here was to meet and pose for pictures

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with the Iowa Republican candidates for office.

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Somehow it reminds a newsman of that famous so-called non-political trip

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which President Roosevelt made around the country to visit defense plants

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just before his third term campaign for the presidency.

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And now back to John Daly in New York.

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Mr. Chairman, Senator Hickenlooper, Senator Martin, distinguished guests, my friends.

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I am delighted to be out here today to enjoy the colorful contest and to exchange a word of greeting with you.

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Now all of us know we are in the midst of a political campaign.

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But so far as I know, political speeches have never picked any corn.

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So I won't talk long, and as I stated before accepting this invitation, I certainly won't talk politics.

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I will say this much.

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If on this coast-to-coast trip I am now making, I can get on my side the ratio against the other

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that you people do on the corn hog ratio, I am going to be most successful.

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Now this national corn in our ability to produce, we have a tremendous advantage over the communist world.

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The free American farm worker outproduces the collectivized farmer of the Soviet Union by something like four or five to one.

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Now today, the communist world is hard pressed to feed itself.

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Communist countries can offer guns to countries outside the Iron Curtain.

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They cannot offer food to starving people.

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They can create disturbances in struggling nations.

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They cannot create better diets.

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The communists can arouse hatred in people's hearts.

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They are unable to satisfy the hunger in people's stomachs.

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But America can provide food, thereby helping people to advance along the road that all of us want to travel, that of rising standards.

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Our farmers have therefore given us a great instrument of world diplomacy.

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These things are merely some facts that impress me as I talk to you, the people who fill the nation's breadbasket.

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But I could not leave an audience such as this, speaking only of technical facts applying to the whole science of agriculture.

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Rather I would talk for a moment, with your permission, of the one outstanding problem,

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the one that overshadows everything we do in America, whether we are on the farm, in the factory, in the office, or working on the road.

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It is a problem of developing and maintaining a just and lasting peace.

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Now, much is often spoken about the American foreign policy.

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The foreign policy itself is the simplest thing in the world to describe in terms of its basic objectives.

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First of all, we believe in the avoidance of force as an instrument of national policy.

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This means we believe in the United Nations, or at least in the principles written into that noble charter.

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Next, we understand that you cannot bargain or negotiate in a world that is torn by dissension except from a position of strength.

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We know that we face certain threats, and if we are going to speak peace about peace, we must do it from a position of strength and not of fear.

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Consequently, our nation's security must be one of the things, its military security, that commands our attention every day if we are going to talk peace.

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Our national defense mechanisms have as one of their first functions that of supporting diplomacy in seeking peace.

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And another part of our foreign policy is merely this.

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Firm refusal to countenance communist territorial expansion by force.

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We must live by principle.

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We don't live by deciding upon the value or the lack of value of small bits of territory.

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The United States today, the United States facing the great monolithic atheistic dictatorship that is centered in the Kremlin,

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realizes that the free world will be far much stronger, far stronger, to defend against that threat if we stick closely together.

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And so we take a look and see what we need and what those friends of ours need.

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And we need their strength often in the front lines to keep small fires from breaking out.

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But they need our help because if they have any kind of military strength at all, often they can't afford it.

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And there is where not only our agricultural products but other forms of economic assistance to make their economies capable of producing the strength that we need in these far regions if we are collectively, all of us, to be safe.

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So we give them that kind of assistance in several forms, sometimes as money, to you and to the Almighty under whom all of us live.

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I am grateful for the good harvest. I am grateful for the improvement in foreign income.

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I am grateful that you as individuals are still running the farms and that we are not trying to turn that job over to the federal government.