Live Stock Breeders' Association. 117 



seem to me to be such a stupendous question to answer, after all. 

 In my humble opinion, he is not truly prosperous because he is not 

 truly making money. And he is not making money because, under 

 present conditions, he cannot make money; and he cannot make 

 money for the all-sufficient reason that he has to sell his products 

 for less than they cost him. And in this connection I should like 

 to suggest that the most vital and pressing need of American agri- 

 culture today is not a bigger yield, but a better price for the yield 

 we already have. To put agriculture upon a truly prosperous 

 basis, is the one supreme duty of our country today. 



Now I am quite aware that a great many farmers claim that 

 they are making money; and in this claim I know that they are 

 entirely honest. But if there is one question in all the realm of 

 finance upon which a man may be, and is most likely to be honestly 

 mistaken, it is the question of Finance on the Farm. 



Every farmer should realize that he has two bank accounts, 

 one which we may call his checking or cash account, and the other 

 his reserve or soil fertility account. Now each of these two ac- 

 counts, like two ordinary bank accounts, can be increased or de- 

 creased at the expense of the other; but it must be remembered 

 that transferring money from one account to another is not a pro- 

 cess of creating wealth, and the farmer who draws upon his soil 

 fertility account and deposits it with his cash account, is very liable 

 to imagine that by this process he is really making money. It is 

 poor policy for a business concern to have to draw upon its capital 

 stock in order to pay dividends and it is poor policy for the farmer 

 to draw upon his fertility account in order to make himself believe 

 that he is prospering. Now this is the very thing that has been 

 done, and is still being done by the average American farmer ; and 

 just as sure as no business concern can long continue its existence 

 when it is forced to draw upon its capital stock in order to pay 

 dividends, just so sure is the American farmer destined to ultimate 

 ruin, if he must continue to draw upon his soil fertility account in 

 order to show a profit. 



Now, I have taken up a good deal of your time in trying to 

 bring you to the point I wish to make clear to you. I have tried to 

 show you that we cannot permanently maintain our soil fertility 

 by any known method of crop rotation, or of feeding our products 

 on the farm; but that even under the best possible farm manage- 

 ment, we must buy at least a part of our fertilizer; but if the 

 farmer receives for his products only the cost of his investment and 

 labor, and nothing for the fertilizers in his products, how is he 



