THE FOOD CRISIS AND AMERICANISM 



is labor in some form. The value of the raw material 

 is an exceedingly small part of the price paid. He who 

 can discover how he can increase profits by paying 

 more for what he buys, and receiving less for what he 

 sells, will put himself in the class of Edison and 

 Wright. 



Again, there is a general impression that vast im- 

 provements have been made in farm machinery and 

 farm implements in the last twenty years. Nothing 

 can be more erroneous. Since 1826, when that Eng- 

 lish clergyman put the first reaper into a field of grain, 

 scarcely more than a dozen implements in general use 

 and thought indispensable for the average farm, have 

 been invented. Chiefest among these are the mower, 

 the hay tedder, hay loader, horse rake, horse fork for 

 unloading hay, the reaper and binder, applying to both 

 corn and small grain, the check-row corn planter, the 

 disc harrow, the manure spreader, the corn sheller, etc., 

 all of which were in general use long prior to 1893, 

 many of them for forty years. Since the Farm Im- 

 plement business became monopolized, improvements 

 in them, if any, have been chiefly to aid sales not 

 to add to their utility. The gasoline or oil motor has 

 not yet become an appreciable factor in agriculture, 

 and its practical utility on the average farm has not 

 been fully demonstrated. On a drive of over six hun- 

 dred miles last Fall, studying crop conditions in the 

 best sections of Illinois and Iowa, I saw only four 

 tractors at work on nearly 2,400 farms, under observa- 

 tion, and this too at a time when Fall plowing and Fall 

 seeding should have been in full swing. 



That the lack of the farmers' credit has interfered 



