THE WORK OF A PRODUCE EXCHANGE. 



By N. p. Wescott, 

 Eastern Shore of Virginia Produce Exchange, Onley, Va. 



Farming, today and in this country, is fundamentally a business — a 

 method of making a living. There are persons who live on farms and who, 

 more or less by proxy, conduct farm enterprises, by reason of a purely 

 intellectual interest in the processes involved, or of a real or imagined taste 

 for the much-advertised delights of country life, or a pride of proprietor- 

 ship, or from other motives unmixed with economic necessity. But these 

 fortunate individuals are not farmers; they are only ''gentlemen-farmers." 

 The true farmer farms not for love but money — and gets his poetry else- 

 where. Whether he stays and works the farm of his fathers or whether he 

 abandons the rear end of the plow for the front deck of a trolley car, it's 

 because he can — or thinks he can — earn more that way; and whether he 

 sows wheat, plants cotton or beds sweet potatoes, the ultimate crop he 

 hopes to harvest is one of dollars and cents, and the exact measure of his 

 success is the amount of his net profits at the end of the year. Moreover, 

 after a boyhood on the farm and an experience of four years in working 

 for some three thousand farmers, I shamelessly make the sordid assertion 

 that profitable farming is profitable farming, and — Horace's celebrated 

 catalogue of delights to the contrary notwithstanding — that it is the only 

 pleasant kind. 



From this it follows that the basic factor in the problem of the farmer's 

 welfare is the economic factor, and that in any thoroughgoing effort 

 to improve the condition and promote the happiness of the farmer the 

 question of profitableness demands first consideration and offers logically 

 the best ground of attack. In attacking this problem, great stress has 

 been laid upon the obvious and visible fault of unscientific methods of 

 production; everywhere we now see experts at work teaching the farmer 

 how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. But there 

 is a more insidious fault — one less apparent but equally destructive of 

 the farmer's fair measure of prosperity — which has been, I believe, not 

 fully appreciated or even clearly perceived — and certainly not sufficiently 

 attended to. Of what use to the farmer is the product in beef or grain 

 of the two blades of grass if it have not a ready and profitable market? 

 As a matter of actual experience, the farmer with a doubled output, ex- 

 ceeding the normal demand or overflowing the usual channels of distribu- 

 tion, frequently finds that the very bounteousness of his harvest spells 

 disaster; for the tolls levied by the various agencies of distribution are, 

 in general, fixed charges, at so much per unit, and with even a slight de- 



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