82 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



who can lend a ray of sunshine for today and a gleam of hope for 

 tomorrow, adding to the sum total of human happiness — life in 

 the country and in the town will be worth while, and such will 

 not have lived in vain and such will make the good State of 

 Missouri a better Missouri. 



THE ESSENTIALS OF FARM CREDIT. 



(Hon. B. F. Harris, Champaign, 111.) 



When the automobile was first introduced it was said it 

 would find its greatest employment and be most used in France, 

 because it required the good, hard roads which they had par 

 excellence. By the same logic it was prophesied that the United 

 States having bad roads most of the time and poor roads all the 

 time could not use the automobile to any extent. This prophet, 

 however, did not know us, nor our habit of building from the top 

 down — getting the cart before the horse. Contrary to prophecy, 

 we excel in the use of the automobile as we do in bad roads — we 

 got the automobile before we got dependable roads — but, work- 

 ing in our illogical way, the automobile is going to bring good 

 roads a generation earlier than otherwise. 



The same trait is now finding another illustration in our 

 cry for better farm financing methods before we begin to cor- 

 rect our ruinously bad and wasteful farming methods, which are 

 such as to forbid or call for anything but longer term loans at 

 lower rates. At our present pace of soil exhaustion there would 

 be no farm or fertility left, and the mortgagor would find an 

 abandoned farm at the end of the long term mortgage. Yet 

 after all, this cry for better farm loan rates is going to have its 

 effect in bringing modern and permanent farm methods years 

 sooner than otherwise. 



The first point I want to bring home, speaking as a farmer 

 and as a friend of agriculture — of 20th century agriculture as a 

 business proposition, and opposed to and condemning the 

 average, present-day haphazard farming — is the necessity of 

 modern and systematic farming, not alone for the increased re- 

 turns it will bring, but as absolutely demanded for soil pres- 

 ervation as well as for self-preservation. As agriculture, or the 

 soil, is the basis of all our social and material superstructure, we 

 know, but need to be reminded, that the character and per- 

 manency of the latter depend entirely upon the constructive, 

 permanent and conserving methods we employ on the farms. 



