i I
a»e
CAHOUM
Vnlon
Farmer
Vol. VII.—No. 14.
RALEIGH. N. C. APRIL 3, 1913.
One Dollar a Year.
EDITORIAL SHORT-STOPS
BY J. Z. GREEN
R ural credit plans may give farmers some re
lief from the burdens of usury. What far
mers need more* than anything else is not credit
but cash—more of the consumer’s dollar.
their prizes to those who produce most on the
farm and never a one of them offer any prize for
the best co-operative selling system? Farmers
want prices, not prizes.
The function of our educational system should
be to find out the bent and temperament of each
child and educate him for what he is fitted by na
ture for, instead of dealing with students in the
mass as though they were all cast in the same
mold.
No benefit has yet been derived from anti-trust
laws except to pay court costs and lawyers’ and
receivers’ fees, and these fees ultimately come out
of the consumer, after the company organizes un
der another name and raises the price of its pro
ducts.
An April fool is a farmer who works his land
through the month when it is too wet.
Bonds for good roads are all right if the funds
are handled for road building on a business basis,
instead of using it to reward politcal chair warm
ers. The political job hunter can scent a good
roads appropriation afar off.
Watch your Farmers’ Union leaders. They may
mean well but they are treading on dangerous
ground if they permit partisan politicans to rec
ognize their worth by bestowing political appoint
ments upon them.
The extra session of Congress will pull off an
other tariff show. After they revise the tariff,
prices to consumers will be practically the same
as now, and you farmers will continue to pay that
high credit “tariff” to your time merchant for
what you buy and also continue to let an army of
useless middlemen take a “tariff” of 65 cents of
the consumer’s dollar when you sell. If you have
been waiting for politicians to give you relief
through a political tariff, you can now get ready
for the biggest disappointment of your life. It’s
coming all right—when Congress gets together
and piles the “relief” dow’n on you.
In this country the government iself has creat
ed a gigantic money trust. A rural credit idea
will not get far without the sanction of the mon
ey trust. Give the farmer a fair price for his
products and he will have the cash to do business
v.dth.
In pointing out the weak places in the record
of the recent North Carolina Legislature, the Pro
gressive Farmer “missed the whole shootin’
match,” so far as the interests of the farmer are
concerned. It forgot to put it in bold-face letters,
or in any other kind of letters, that the Legisla
ture failed to make it compulsory for the Com
missioner of Agriculture to use a fair proportion
of the two hundred thousand dollar fund which
farmers pay into that department in teaching sys
tematic marketing along with systematic produc
tion.
Isn’t it nearly time for the Commissioners of
Agriculture in the South to again start on the
rounds to try to get farmers not to produce too
much cotton? It looks like double taxes to teach
the boys how to produce and then follow it up
again, at the expense of the tax payers, with a
campaign to put them on guard against producing
too much! But then the farmers are good-natur
ed, and they can stand it all right. They’ve been
standing it with a great deal of patience.
Get improved farming implements, of course.
But don’t be in too big a hurry to make your se
lection of an untried implement in your locality.
Millions of dollars have been Invested in imple
ments that were soon discarded to rust out.
What became of the idea of establishing a bu
reau of markets in connection with the Depart
ment of Agriculture? That’s really a more im
portant matter than the Torrens System of regis
tering land titles. Unless we have a reformed
system of marketing those who actually till the
soil will, in the course of time, have no land titles
to register. Those who are given the uncontested
right to price the products of the land will ulti
mately own the land upon which the products are
grown.
isn’t it strange that all the benefactors offer
Working for the benefit of somebody else.
That’s what the farmer does who bends all his en
ergies to produce big crops, the prices of which
decline in proportion to the increased yields.
f|l o
in
;i! ;
‘ I ■
I
I
I r.
; .[
I I ■
I i *
; .!ini
: ;&'i
V
IM'f
j I f '
.: nii
:■!
I I !
I
I -I
!l