Briefly you have shown very clearly and very correctly that the present practice of agriculture in America tends toward land ruin, and that, with our rapidly increasing population, with continued depletion of our vast areas of cultivated soils, and with no possibility of any large extension of well-watered arable lands, we are already facing the serious problem of providing sufficient food for our own people.

You summarize your conclusions along this line in the following words: 

“We have to provide for a contingency not distant from us by nearly a generation, but already present.  The food condition presses upon us now.  The shortage has begun.  Witness the great fall in wheat exports and the rise of prices.  Obviously it is time to quit speculating about what may occur even twenty or thirty years hence, and begin to take thought for the morrow.  As far as our food supply is concerned, right now the lean years have begun.”

It is certain that the time is near when our food supplies shall become inadequate if our present practices continue, but the enforced reduction in animal products will at least postpone the time of actual famine in America.  I keep in mind always that we are feeding much grain to domestic animals, an extremely wasteful practice so far as economy of human food is concerned; because, as an average, animals return in meat and milk not more than onefifth as much food value as they destroy in the corresponding grain consumed; and, as we gradually reduce the amounts of grain that are fed to cattle, sheep, and swine, we shall also gradually increase our human food supply.  Ultimately our milk-producing and meat-producing animals will be fed only the grass grown upon the non-arable lands and possibly some refuse forage not suitable for human food or more valuable for green manure, unless we modify our present practice and tendency, which we can do if the proper influences are exerted by the intelligent people of this country, and thus make possible the continuation of high standards of living for all our people.

I keep in mind, too, that much of the food taken into the average American kitchen is wasted, and that progress in the science of feeding the man will ultimately prevent this waste and, by adding to this better preparation and combination of foods, will increase to some extent the nutritive value of our present food supply.

The serious fact remains, however, that our older lands are decreasing in productive power and, in spite of what may be accomplished by such methods of conservation, we are now facing a rapidly approaching shortage of food supplies for the rapidly increasing population of these United States; and you have put me and all other American citizens under lasting obligations to you for your frankness, good sense, and true patriotism in thus pointing out n advance our great national weakness.