Report of Missouri Farmers'' Week. 85 



last of the expense, etc. This plan, now so generally in use in 

 European farm and other mortgages, is known as amortizemxent. 



Such loans, given for a long period, make the payments so 

 small that any industrious farmer can meet them and, if through 

 any adverse circumstances he should fail in any payment, the 

 local banker could easily help him out. This spreads the pay- 

 ments well into the future, allows more income to be invested on 

 the farm and practically removes all chance of foreclosure. 



As our farm mortgages go now, they are for short three or 

 five-year periods, which make the payments unnecessarily heavy 

 and concentrated, and as these mortgages are frequently re- 

 newed or re-negotiated, it results in frequent brokerage fees, 

 expenses, etc., to the farmer and annoyance to the mortgagee, 

 all of which tends to increase the rate and expense. 



Long term mortgages on the amortizement plan, or deben- 

 tures issued against them, by banks chartered and regulated by 

 law would find a ready market on favorable terms, especially as 

 our farm methods improve and investors are assured of the 

 farm's fertility being properly conserved. 



As we see it, few of our farmers borrow to improve their 

 farms, as they should if they borrow at all, but they borrow to 

 pay for the farm or buy more land. We must learn to treat well 

 and properly develop that which we already have, and not starve 

 our farms to buy more. Then, too, the landlord and tenant 

 cannot get results or maintain soil fertility with one to three- 

 year leases, which result in robbing the soil. Money borrowed 

 should be more largely for creative or constructive purposes. 



Our earnings, or rather our farm income, have been greatly 

 increased — in fact, in the last ten years values of farm products 

 have advanced two to fourfold with scarcely any increase in the 

 quantity, the increase in price being forty-seven times the 

 increase in quantity. Few of the farmers are putting much or 

 any of this increase back into the soil and at the same time they 

 are borrowing more money, which goes to show that they are 

 speculating in land instead of feeding the goose that lays the 

 golden egg. 



Most of the apparent profit in farming has been in the ad- 

 vance in the value of farm land, and some of this advance comes 

 on the basis of the selling price per bushel instead of on the basis 

 of the bushel yield per acre, which is not being maintained. 

 These are the things that the money lender very properly con- 



