Newspapers / The Carolina Union Farmer … / Oct. 26, 1911, edition 1 / Page 4
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THE . CAROLINA UNION PARMER . Thursday, October 26, 1911 The Carolina Union Farmer Publithed evmry Thurtday BY THE UNION FARMtR PUBLISHINO COMPANY Official Organ of The North Carolina Parmer*' Union Subscription Price: $ 1 .OO a Year All subscriptions are payable in advance, and the paper will be discontinued when the time expires, unless renewed. The date on the tag which bears the name of the subscriber indicates the time to which the subscription has been paid. C. A. EURY. General Manager J. Z. GREEN, MarshTille, Editoral Department ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES JOHN D. ROSS, 812 Hartford Building, Chicago L. E. WHITE, Tribune Building, New York Entered as second class matter, August 17, 1911, at the post office at Gastonia, North Carolina, under the act of March ii, lb79. Gastonia, North Carolina, October 26, 1911 T EDITORIAL COMMENT IE Texas Farm Co-Operator says: “The cotton crop of India, China, and Egypt is about one million bales short of last year, and it will take the excess in the American crop to make up the deficit in' the foreign cotton fields, so the farmer need not be scared. If the crop does turn out a little large, the vol ume of cotton will be about what it was last year, and the price last year at the ports was 14.60, and the present crop ought by all means to be worth as much as last year’s crop and will bring as much money, if the farmer will stop selling until the market gets right.” ❖ ❖ ❖ HE politicians and “big” farmers—the kind that have tenants to grow from a thousand to three thousand bales of cotton, get interested in the price of cotton when it goes down below cost of pro duction. Very few of these large absentee landlords, who live in town, are members of the Farmers’ Unign, in some instances be cause they are not eligible to membership, but generally because they feel like they are big enough to get along without the Farmers’ Union, but as we intimated above, they get “powerfully” interested in mass meetings when the price goes down below normal, and mass meetings, calamity oratory and resolu tions, especially the latter are some of the things they have been engaged in for several weeks now. And the bad part about it is, ev ery time they resolute this season the price of cotton seems to take another tumble. They arc going to hold another meeting in New Or leans some time in the near'future and reso lute some more, A public mass meeting has never done anything except resolute and that’s all a meeting of that kind ever will do, for it’s all it can do. If the price of cotton, or the price of any other farm product, is ever con trolled, it will be done only through a busi ness system of marketing, supported and maintained by the rank and file of the farmers who till the soil, through a class organization like the Farmers’ Union. •I* + + TJ^HEN the chamber of commerce at Fay- etteville decided to get busy and ask ^9 every individual citizen, professional man, clerk, druggist, merchant and everybody else in the town, to buy at least one bale of “distressed” cotton and hold it for bet ter prices, it suggested a plan, which if fol lowed by every town in the South successfully, would produce more tangible results, and pro duce it quicker, than any other emergency plan that might be suggested. The Fayetteville plan is more practical and, if generally adopted, would do more for the price of cotton than a public “resoluting” mass meeting could do, if one were held in every town, village and school district in the South. Buying up “dis tressed egtton by Southern men would produce real results and it wouldn’t be long about it. We hope Fayetteville will live up to the idea suggested by its chamber of commerce and that every other Southern town will quit howl ing about the price of cotton and proceed to hold up “distressed” cotton on the streets and keep it away from the consuming world until the markets get hungry enough to pay a fair price for it. ❖ ❖ ❖ HE PUBLIC mass meeting at Raleigh last week was very well attended, a good sprinkling of Farmers Union folks being in attendance. The great er portion of the crowd present represented other interests and there was much speech making, most of it coming from men not mem bers of the Union. To the Farmers’ Union men present, who have for years been meet ing in their Local Unions every two weeks studying the great marketing problem which must be worked out only through the estab lishment of a warehouse system of marketing, it was entertaining, and at times amusing, to hear the friendly criticisms and suggestions as to what the Farmers’ Union should do—sug gestions coming from those who get interest ed in a marketing system for farmers only pe riodically, when the emergencies of low prices come. ❖ ❖ 4* ’JT j’ N THE FACE of the well-known fact that in no State have the big landlords ever been worth much to the Farmers’ Union, a daily paper of Columbia, S. C., suggested last week that the heavy-weight cotton farmers—the fellows whose tenants produce a thousand bales, or more—men who have been howling successes in that kind of business, just grab hold of the Farmers’ Union, make the “one-gallus” fellows step aside, and then proceed to turn the world up side down. Now, if these fellows, “who have made a success,” can do it, and will do it, they will find the “one-gallus” fellows in the Union just a-hurtin’ to step aside and see the fur fly, but if they do it, it will be the first time in the history of the world that any real reform has started from that source. The reason the present low-price of cotton is hurting the thousand-bale fellows so much more than it is hurting the real farmer who makes his living at home, as every farmer should do, exists in the fact that he planted his big cotton crop and cultivated it with high-priced mules, high- priced labor and is now forced to pay more for picking than when the price was fifteen cents—and he did all this with 15 cent cotton and 50 cent cotton on the brain, and unless something happens he will lose fifteen or twen ty dollars per bale, and of course he will go to the mass-meetings now, and talk, too! 4* 4* ❖ T’S A PITY that when it comes to building up a permanent farmers’ or ganization and establishing a general warehouse system of marketing to rc- form our suicidal system of street selling, the Farmers’ Union can never get any help from the heavy-weight fellows except in cases of emergencies, and then only through high- sounding resolutions emanating from a public mass-meeting I HE PUBLIC resolutions passed by the Imass meeting at Raleigh last week to reduce cotton acreage next year are not worth the paper they were written upon. If the farmers will learn the lesson I purchase of cheap soluble fertilizers that are all gone out of the soil in a few months. And don’t exchange cotton seed for cotton seed meal unless you get as much as a ton of mea^ for a ton of seed, but put the cotton seed back on the land and build your soil! Without soil building there can be no success on the farm, and raw cotton seed is a mighty good soil builder. 4* 4* OME GOOD speaking was done at the Raleigh meeting last week, but the bi^' gest thing said in that convention vvas the suggestion of Mr. Thompson, oi Raleigh, that the Farmers’ Union should ceive no farmer as a member who does not produce a living at home. While it would have been impractical to do this at the begi*^' ning of the organization, and it is hardly praO' tical now, the carrying of a policy of that kind would certainly go to the bottom of nearly our troubles. It would be well, at the begl^ ning of next 3 ear for the State officials to pare blanks for the purpose of finding how many members produced all the food ducts needed on their farms this year and al so find out how many are willing to pE'd®^ themselves to plant for a living at home ne^^ year, for this is the most important ecoiion’*^ question that confronts the Southern farnu^*'’ or will confront him. ■5 well that real effective business transactions are not done in the open public meetings and that they stultify themselves in the minds of the business world every time they get to gether and publicly “resolute” about their business affairs, it will be a valuable lesson from which we may reasonably expect results. There wiil be a voluntary reduction of cotton acreage next year regardless of meetings and resolutions. The pendulum is going to swing backward as a natural result of low-priced cotton and cotton seed. The Farmers’ Union educational campaign for the general adoption of the fundamental Live-at-Home idea of farm economics has done more to correct the suicidal economic error of buying a living at the stores than any other influence that has ever been brought to bear upon agricultural life in this country, and the continuation of this Live-at-Home campaign will continue to produce results. It is the Live-at-Home fel low who is holding his cotton this year with out financial embarrassment. He is sitting steady in the boat and is not nervous, because he has no debts to pa}^ and does not have to sell his cotton to buy a living at the stores. Millions of others are now preparing to join the Live-at-Home arm}' by sowing cotton lands in small grain as fast as the cotton is removed from the fields. While the low price of cotton is bringing temporary disaster to the South as a whole, it is a blessing in disguise for the farmers. It will help them to see the necessity of pushing along the establishment of a warehouse S3'Stem of selling and also be 3. powerful inducement to them to get over on the safe side by joining the Farmers’ Union Livc-at-Home crowd. 4- 4* 4* T IS THE poorest sort of economy to sell cotton seed at the present ridicu lously low prices and then make a gi gantic fertilizer trust richer by the ;
The Carolina Union Farmer (Charlotte, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
Oct. 26, 1911, edition 1
4
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