THE FARMERS INDEMNITY 
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eighties and nineties most farmers killed their own meat, while 
today a great part of the farming population supplies itself 
from the butcher’s. The urbanization of the country through the 
automobile has forced the farmer to buy more clothes. In view 
of such considerations it is difficult to draw a valid comparison 
between the purchasing power commanded by the farmer of a 
generation ago with the purchasing power commanded by the 
farmers of today. Yet anyone who will analyze the terms on 
which farm produce was actually exchanged for industrial 
products thirty-five years ago will be pretty sure to conclude 
that the cards were stacked against the farmer as ruthlessly then 
as they are today. 
The farm we are studying takes in three dollars today for one 
dollar in the nineties. Industrial prices have by no means 
advanced three hundred per cent. Yet the farm was prosperous 
in the nineties. It is plain to see that the farm is not prosperous 
today. 
Let us glance at its financial status. The original owner 
obtained the land from the government under the preémption act 
and paid $1.25 an acre, out of his pocket. So long as he held the 
land, for every dollar's worth of produce sold off the farm a 
dollar’s worth of industrial products came back. Hence the 
spacious house and well built barn, the windmill, fences, bridges, 
tiles for drainage, orchard trees, evergreens for the windbreak; 
hence the surplus for bringing up a lusty family of boys 
and girls, ultimately for the service of the railways and the 
public schools. The present occupant, like many of his neigh- 
bors, is childless, and the little white school house has been torn 
down. 
The farm was sold to the second owner at fifty dollars an acre, 
four-fifths represented by a mortgage. Thereafter its chief busi- 
ness, through many years, was to sweat out interest and pay- 
ments on the principal. It had barely cleared off the mortgage 
when it was sold again, in 1910, for one hundred dollars an acre, 
again three-fourths mortgage. For some years the farm could 
barely hold its own against the interest. Then came war prices, 
and the principal shrank rapidly. But in the time of the great 
land boom in 1919 the farm was sold for $200 an acre, of which 
$160 still stands as mortgage. When prices are good the farmer 
manages to pay the interest; when they are bad he does not.