Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: The farmers' indemnity / Alvin S. Johnson

Collection:: Economics Books

THE FARMERS INDEMNITY 221 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.

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