Roy Blunt: “on Monday I spoke at the annual meeting of the Missouri Farm Bureau, and, in our State, as in, frankly, almost every…”

“on Monday I spoke at the annual meeting of the Missouri Farm Bureau, and, in our State, as in, frankly, almost every other State, the No. 1 economic activity in terms of value produced is agriculture. Where we live in the middle of the country, we do better in an economy that focuses on growing things and making things than we do on an economy that focuses more on giving advice--not that we don't want to give a lot of advice, but the truth is we don't want to get a lot of advice, either. So there is nothing wrong with a service-based economy, and there is nothing wrong with an important service sector in our economy, but America, in so many ways, was built on a productive economy, on an economy that produced something and something tangible. I think we have a chance to see those things happen again. Where we are located, almost exactly in the middle of the country, the Mississippi River Valley is the biggest piece of contiguous agricultural land in the world. Compared to the near competitors in size, it is the only one of them that has its own built-in, natural transportation center. In fact, there are more miles of navigable river in the Mississippi River Valley than in the rest of the world put together.…”