"We do have a great welfare program. We try to take care of the needs of our own people. So, where we are strongly established—in the United States, for instance—we have welfare farms that produce agricultural products. We have facilities to can and store those products. We have facilities for packaging, processing, and distribution. It's all part of an obligation we feel to take care of our own, while at the same time reaching out in a spirit of humanitarianism to people in distress, wherever they may be" (Gordon B. Hinckley, Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley [1997], 687).

"The revelation to produce and store food may be as essential to our temporal welfare today as boarding the ark was to the people in the days of Noah" (Ezra Taft Benson, "To the Fathers in Israel," Ensign, Nov. 1987, 49).

"I do not want to be a calamity howler. I don't know in detail what's going to happen in the future. I know what the prophets have predicted. But I tell you that the welfare program, organized to enable us to take care of our own needs, has not yet performed the function that it was set up to perform. We will see the day when we will live on what we produce.

"We're living in the latter days. We're living in the days the prophets have told about from the time of Enoch to the present day. We are living in the era just preceding the second advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are told to so prepare and live that we can be, as was referred to or intimated by one of the speakers here today, independent of every other creature beneath the celestial kingdom. That is what we are to do" (Marion G. Romney, in Conference Report, Apr. 1975, 165).

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