222 IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



"My friend," he said, "if I had taken my $50,000 and invested it in 

 some land I know of in Harrison county at a hundred dollars or so an 

 acre, I would have heen just as successful in establishing a commercial 

 orchard there as I have been here. My experience is this, that a man has 

 to face no greater problems in growing apples in the favorable sections 

 of Iowa that he does out here. I wish I were back in Iowa and that I 

 had understood Iowa and Iowa possibilities." 



The other story in which you will be interested is about a man who 

 lives in Waterloo and owns a farm or two near Waterloo. He is worth 

 something like $150,000 or $200,000, and chiefly because Waterloo has 

 been growing factory smoke stacks in the past ten years and the develop- 

 ment of its industries has caused a great movement of population toward 

 Waterloo. This man was wise enough to keep his farms and they have 

 increased wonderfully in value. Not long ago, he needed a gasoline engine 

 and a cream separator on his farm. He sent his money to Racine, Wis- 

 consin, for the gasoline engine and to some city in New Jersey for his 

 cream separator. He ignored absolutely the fact that in Waterloo, the 

 city which had made him rich, are concerns which manufacture as good 

 gasoline engines and as good cream separators as are made anywhere. 

 His wealth had been made in Iowa; he had sent his good Iowa money 

 away to buy the things that might have been bought at home. 



What do these two stories indicate? Well, they indicate a number of 

 things. 



To begin with, the first story illustrates the great exodus of population 

 from Iowa to other districts which has been going on for years, in large 

 measure because Iowa people do net understand Iowa's possibilities. The 

 census statistics show that more than half a million native born lowans 

 are living elsewhere, while only about 1,800,000 native lowans are still 

 living within the state. We have thus lost in recent years more than 

 half a million of our sons and daughters who should have given the best 

 in them to our state, but who have devoted themselves and their energies 

 to the up-building of other commonwealths. 



Every spring in one community or the other, car load after car load 

 of household goods is loaded by people who are on the move in a vain 

 search for better things elsewhere. California is populated largely by 

 lowans. They hold annual picnics on the coast which are attended by 

 tens, of thousands of former inhabitants of the Hawkeye state. At such a 

 picnic at Lcs Angeles sometimes 40,000 to 50,000 former Iowa people ac- 

 tually register. The Dakotas, Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyom- 

 ing, the states of the northwest— Oregon and Washington— are filled 

 with lowans. 



It is hard to estimate how much this loss of population has cost the 

 state. It is probably true that if we represent the loss in dollars and 

 cents it would not be less than half a billion dollars, counting human 

 life at only a thousand dollars per individual, and that is as cheap as 

 Iowa human life goes. This loss of population means also an enormous 

 property loss, because these people took good bank accounts with them. 



