210 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



the manufactured goods until the whole system has so permeated 

 our national life that we have a business government, so intricate 

 and vast in all its ramifications that it sets our little brains whiz- 

 zing and buzzing and we give up in despair and go back to produc- 

 tion again. 



I want the farmer to do some of this manufacturing, especially 

 that pertaining to his products, both for his own benefit and for 

 the benefit of the consumer, because, this handing over the sale and 

 manufacturing of the farmer's produce to a middleman and manu- 

 facturer has for some, to me, inexplicable reason centered all manu- 

 facturing in cities and towns and has deprived the farmer of labor 

 and large quantities of waste material. This deprivation of the 

 farmer of his labor and the enormous demands of profit by so called 

 business and manufacture, enabling both to pay larger wages than 

 the farmer, has made the farmer the servant of the entire system, 

 and may finally result in a reduction of consumption of the farmer's 

 products, as has already been done by an anti-meat consuming 

 organization started in our national capital, and thus deprive the 

 laboring man's dinner pail eventually of the viands that grace the 

 middleman's and the manufacturer's tables, and in this way this 

 system puts the farmer, the producer, and the consumer at the mercy 

 of the middleman and the manufacturer. It vitiates the farmer's 

 efficiency, and makes him a derelict of his God given duty, that of 

 feeding mankind, and mankind at the present time lives largely on 

 manufactured food. 



Take the crops he raises on his farm and, with few exceptions, 

 they have to be manufactured before man now uses them as food. 

 The farmer does little or none of this but sells to a second party 

 who may ship it to the manufacturer, who manufactures it, ships it 

 to the consumer or perhaps to the very farmer who produced the 

 article, with the added cost of two, three or four handlings and the 

 commissions of as many intermediaries, costing probably more than 

 it cost to produce the original article. The staple crops, such as 

 wheat and corn, except in its unripe condition, must be manu- 

 factured before they are in condition for consumption by man. 

 From one-half to two-thirds of the corn crop and from fifty to sixty 

 per cent, of the wheat crop is inedible by man. The same thing is 

 well nigh entirely true of the grasses and clovers from which he 

 makes his hay, and in order to make these available for human food 

 he must utilize the animal, especially the ruminant, the digestive 

 machinery of which is so constructed that it can digest the cruder 

 celluloses and convert them into human foods through a vital ma- 

 chinery of the highest efficiency. I said a machinery of the highest 

 efficiency. He will therefore use a cow that will convert approxi- 

 mately the same amount of food into 9,000 pounds of milk instead of 

 a cow that will make only 3,000 pounds of available human food out 

 of these inedible, by man, products of the soil. 



Here is the beginning of his manufacturing operation. He does 

 all the risky, expensive, laborious and delicate work in the process 

 of production, and why should he not do the manufacturing that is 

 necessary and wherever it is possible to do this, instead of handing 

 it over to be manufactured by one man, peddled by another and con- 

 sumed by a third and let each one of these intermediaries have as 

 large or even a larger profit out of the operation than he has and 

 then call that the business end of the transaction. 



