9 AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT 



Eventually, particularly toward the end of the war, the prices of dairy 

 products increased substantially, although in the case of milk and butter- 

 fat never in comparable degree with the prices of feedstuffs. By 1918 dairy 

 products had registered an average increase of 70 per cent, while the farm 

 price of butter had risen from 25 cents at the beginning of the war to 54 

 cents at its close. Even the high price of butter did not serve to keep up 

 butter production, which declined during the last two years of the war 

 in spite of heavy exports 34,000,000 pounds in 1919, compared with an 

 average of 4,250,000 pounds in the five prewar years. Butter exports, how- 

 ever, were small in comparison with total production; only 2 per cent of 

 the American output was sent overseas. Most important of the dairy in- 

 dustry products from the export point of view were cheese and evaporated 

 milk. The demand for American cheese abroad increased the total export 

 of that item during the war from an initial i per cent of the total amount 

 manufactured to a final 12 per cent. Evaporated milk by the end of the 

 war was exported to the extent of 853,000,000 pounds, nearly half the total 

 produced in the United States and nearly fifty times the prewar export 

 figures. Thus the dairy industry, whatever the complaints of the milk 

 producers, was given a real lift by the war. The number of milk cows on 

 farms increased during the war more than 8.5 per cent, and the total out- 

 put of cheese, butter, and evaporated milk more than 7 per cent. As long 

 as the high wartime wages lasted, the city population could and did buy 

 milk and other dairy products in far greater amounts than formerly. But 

 obviously dairy farming, while expanded by the war, was not overex- 

 panded in like degree with the wheat, corn, and livestock industries. To 

 the milk producers, the collapse of the boom, when it came, would there- 

 fore be less distressing. 23 



The farmers of the western Middle West, whose interests lay primarily 

 in the production of these basic foodstuffs, undoubtedly took a heavy profit 

 out of the war. Never before had American farmers received such prices. 

 Yet they did not think of themselves as profiteers. One authority reported 

 that from the 1917 crop the average farmer received not more than from 

 seventy-five cents to a dollar an hour for his labor, while the 1918 crop, 



(April 25, 1919), p. 944; (May 16, 1919), p. 1065; Litman, Prices and Price Control, 

 pp. 256-59. 



23. Ibid., pp. 190, 256-61; Genung, in Farmers in a Changing World, p. 288. 



