154 FARMERS' UNION AND FEDERATION 



nually, and that product by the number of years you will 

 raise wheat. Unless wheat growers unionize to adopt and 

 enforce the minimum price system based on cost of produc- 

 tion, the big wheat speculators will set a minimum price 

 themselves on wheat at about fifty cents a bushel at the 

 farmers' delivery time, and a maximum price of all they can 

 get for it when in their own possession, which would probably 

 be around eighty cents a bushel. I have shown that the 

 average cost of producing wheat is $2.50 a bushel, which 

 should be the union's minimum price at the beginning of 

 the threshing season, with a monthly increase of two and a 

 half cents a bushel for carrying charge, which would make 

 the maximum price during the year $2.80 a bushel. Now 

 this is just $2.00 a bushel for unionizing. Any wheat grower 

 can easily see what is in it for him. Any township, county 

 and state can easily estimate the increased flow of money to 

 it. Villages, towns and cities will have their patronage from 

 wheat growers increased five-fold. Merchants, laborers, me- 

 chanics and professional people will have their business with 

 wheat growers multiplied by five. Manufacturers of the 

 thousands of articles needed by wheat growers and their 

 families will get five times the business from them, and that 

 will furnish union city labor five times the labor needed to 

 produce them. It is thus seen how all classes except the 

 gamblers and profite.erers in. wheat would be benefited through 

 the wheat growers unionizing to inaugurate the minimum 

 price system. Two dollars on our 800,000,000-bushel wheat 

 crop would keep in circulation $1,600,000,000 and side-track 

 the financial and industrial panic that is bound to come with 

 fifty-cent wheat. 



Cost of Raising Wheat in Kansas. 



One of the most necessary duties of farm organizations is 

 to teach farmers what to figure in as cost of products and the 

 price of each element in their production. So much de- 



