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THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
December 18, 
The Rural New-Yorker 
THE BUSINESS FARMER'S PAPER. 
A National Weekly Journal for Country and Suburban Homes. 
Established 1850. 
Published weekly by the Rural Publishing Company, 409 Pearl Street, Sew York* 
Herbert W. Collingwood, President and Editor, 
John J. Dillon, Treasurer and (General Manager. 
Wm. F. Dillon, Secretary. Mbs. E. T. Roylk, Associate Editor. 
SUBSCRIPTION: ONE DOLLAR A YEAR. 
To foreign countries in the Universal Postal Union, $2.04, equal to 
8 s. 6 d., or 8*2 marks, or lO'n francs. Remit in money order, 
express order, personal check or bank draft. 
Entered at New York Post Office as Second Class Matter. 
Advertising rates 50 cents per agate line—7 words. Discount for timo 
orders. References required for advertisers unknown to 
us; and cash must accompany transient orders. 
"A SQUARE DEAL.” 
We believe that every advertisement in this paper is backed by a 
responsible person. Hut to make doubly sure we will make good any 
loss to paid subscribers sustained by trusting any deliberate swindler 
advertising in ourcolumns, and any such swindler will be publicly ex¬ 
posed. We protect suberibers against rogues, but we do not guarantee 
to adjust trifling differences lietween subscribers and honest, respon¬ 
sible advertisers. Neither will we be responsible for the debts of 
honest bankrupts sanctioned by the courts. Notice of the complaint 
must be sent to us within one month of the timo of the transaction, 
and yon must have mentioned The Rural New-Yorker when 
writing the advertiser. 
TEN WEEKS FOR 10 CENTS. 
In order to introduce The R. N.-Y. to progressive, 
intelligent farmers who do not now take it, we send it 
10 weeks for 10 cents for strictly introductory pur¬ 
poses. We depend on our old friends to make this 
known to neighbors and friends. 
* 
We shall begin early on our Congressman this year, 
and inform him that we do not want any “free seeds.” 
Nothing like getting in early. Then you are in a good 
position to stay late. We like to have Congressmen 
carry lasting impressions to Washington. Let us make 
the first one last. 
* 
Lime, Alfalfa and drainage. There you have a team 
that would haul many an Eastern farm up the hill of 
prosperity. For every acre of “arid land” upon which 
water is to be turned we would like to see an acre 
of soil in the humid regions drained and relieved 
of surplus water. 
* 
At the last election the voters of New York had a 
chance to vote on a canal proposition. It was a permit 
for the State to issue $7,000,000 bonds to improve the 
Seneca and Cayuga Canal. The proposition was car¬ 
ried by 47,395 majority on a light vote. There were 21 
counties in favor and 40 against. Generally speaking, 
the few counties directly affected by the canal, and 
New York City and the southeastern part of the State 
voted in favor of the bonds. Out of 274,184 votes in 
favor of bonding. New York City gave 140,852, or 
more than half. Including Long Island, Westchester 
and Rockland counties, the comparatively small ter¬ 
ritory around the mouth of the Hudson provided 
nearly 70 per cent of the vote which saddled this debt 
upon the State. A very large share of these voters 
own no real estate, pay little tax, but voted for the 
bonds because the job means money for labor. The 
farmers had a good chance to defeat the scheme, but 
they neglected to vote. 
* 
New Hampshire now has a pure seed law. The 
object of it is about the same as that of the fertilizer 
laws. The man who buys seeds is to have some means 
of knowing what he is buying, and some legal redress 
if he is loaded up with weeds and dead seed. Under 
the New Hampshire law seeds will be tested at the 
Experiment Station at Durham, both for dirt and 
weeds, and for vitality. The Connecticut Experiment 
Station has just issued its annual bulletin on seeds. 
Names of dealers are printed and the quality of their 
seeds openly exposed. The samples show that cleaner 
seed is being sold in Connecticut. Last year out of 
51 samples of clover seed 41 contained dodder and 
three were badly adulterated with Black medick. 1 he 
names of the dealers who sold this stuff were printed 
in full. As a result, out of 52 samples examined this 
year only six contained dodder, and there was no 
adulteration. You see the point! When they knew 
their seed was to pass under the point of a microscope 
these seed dealers proceeded to “clean up.” There 
never was anything quite like the purifying power of 
printer’s ink. 
* 
When the train arrived in Webb City yesterday the 
conductor announced: “Webb City,” “Webb City,” and 
the steam cars came to a stop. One liome-seeker, who was 
looking out of the window remarked: “Is this Webb 
City?”. ‘■Yes," replied the conductor. “Well,” he sighed, 
“looks like they have us up a tree.” “No they ain't7’ 
replied a fellow traveler, “cause they ain’t no trees.” And 
the majority of the home-seekers murmured, “Stung.” 
This is taken from an article in the Laredo (Texas) 
Daily Times describing the “opening of Webb City.” 
A large number of “home-seekers” were induced 
through extravagant advertising to buy land. When 
they came to the supposed “city” they found only a 
stretch of raw prairie with a few board shanties. 
There is no redress for them. The pamphlets and cir¬ 
culars which lured them on were so cunningly drawn 
up that when you come to analyze the statements you 
will see that no definite legal promise is made. Texas 
and Florida are both now afflicted by the curse of land 
boomers. In Southern Texas great tracts of desert 
land are being bought at a low figure—often 50 cents 
an acre! These tracts are plotted out into “town lots” 
and farms and sold to suckers in the North at $25 per 
acre or more. There have been one or two seasons of 
fair rainfall, so that something of a crop has been 
grown on this land. Years of drought will follow, 
as they have before, and everything will be burned out. 
The future is hopeless for the poor people who buy 
this land in the expectation of having a home. In 
many parts of Florida the situation is even worse. 
These land frauds are not only criminal, but bitterly 
cruel, and the Government ought to step in and protect 
its citizens. We shall at least do our part in exposing 
such schemes. If any reader of The R. N.-Y. should 
buy land in the South or anywhere else on the strength 
of these extravagant claims he will have only himself 
to blame. 
* 
The battle for honest butter will not be waged 
against oleo as such, or when sold for just what it is. 
Let that fact be made clear from the start. You have 
a right to demand that oleo shall not be sold as coun¬ 
terfeit butter, also that manufacturers and retailers 
obey the State and national laws. At present they 
are not doing this. Owing to defects in these laws 
they are able to twist through them and sell much of 
their counterfeit stuff as honest butter. In addition 
to this the oleo men are trying to change these laws so 
as to leave even larger holes through them. They 
will carry their point unless the dairymen can muster 
their forces and control Congress. That is just what 
one side or the other must do. The oleo men form a 
small, compact body grown rich through evasion of 
the law. They are already organized and will have 
unlimited money to use in their campaign. The dairy¬ 
men and farmers are numerous enough to take care of 
Congress if they can only get together. That is the 
keynote of the whole campaign. Let us first realize 
the danger. It is real, and is now upon us. By all 
means begin to organize and talk it over wherever 
you go. 
* 
High Farming Is No Remedy for Low Prices. 
Sir John B. Lawes, the great nnglish agriculturist 
stated that proposition. "By "high farming” he meant 
that which through greater expense in labor, fertiliz¬ 
ing or fixtures produces large crops. Practically all 
the farming advised by our agricultural teachers re¬ 
quires an increase of capital. Naturally, if all prac¬ 
ticed ‘high farming” there would be a surplus, and 
prices would go lower still. It might be said that 
comparatively few will ever work out the principles of 
agricultural science anyway, sc that these few will 
profit by reducing the cost of a pound of their crop. 
To follow out that argument we should have to con¬ 
sider agricultural education a trade secret—to be im¬ 
parted to only a chosen few. This idea that scientific 
education alone is to settle all our farm problems has 
got to be a sort of superstition with many of our 
teachers. It is so far from the truth of what practical 
men know that it is getting on their nerves! All the 
“high farming” you can pile between the earth and 
the sky will never bring relief so long as the producer 
averages only 35 cents of the consumer’s dollar! By 
“low prices” of course Sir John Lawes meant the 
prices which farmers actually receive. It has come so 
now that prices to the consumer rarely vary, while 
whether the wholesale price is high or low the fixed 
charges for transportation and handling are the same. 
The men who stand in a line between the farm and 
the consumer are practicing a kind of “high farming” 
of the farmer that is certainly a remedy for a full 
pocketbook. The greatest farm problem of the day 
is how to get a fairer share of the consumer’s dollar, 
for the man who must ship or consign his goods. 
This ranks in importance above the problem of in¬ 
creasing production. It ought to be discussed at every 
farmers’ institute, every agricultural college and every 
rural school. We intend to keep at it until it becomes 
a national issue. 
* 
The Alexander Campbell Milk Company of Brook¬ 
lyn, N. Y., is, we understand, offering some of its 
stock for sale to finance the building of a new plant. 
In furtherance of this sale of stock we find it repre¬ 
sented that the company did about $1,000,000 worth 
of business this past year, at a net profit of about 
$100,000. In other words for every dollar’s worth of 
milk handled, there was a net profit to the company 
of 10 cents. It is explained in another way that the 
outstanding stock of the company is $306,100; so that 
the profit on the annual business done is about one- 
third of the capital of the company. Even with this 
record of liberal profits, the price of milk to the con¬ 
sumer has now been advanced one cent a quart. Sup¬ 
pose the farmers who produced the milk could make 
a profit each year amounting to one-third of the value 
of his farm, stock, and general equipment. If this 
were possible we would hear less about the diffi¬ 
culty of keeping the boys and girls on the farm; and 
the uplift commission would find bath tubs and all 
the other luxuries their hearts could wish in country 
homes. The entire power of “agricultural education” 
seems applied to the work of telling farmers how to 
make more milk to the cow and to the acre. Try the 
experiment of switching this power to the job of get¬ 
ting a fair share of what he produces. Are dairymen 
in the habit of paying all their expenses, making im¬ 
provements, paying big salaries to all the family and 
then pocketing 10 cents out of every dollar’s worth of 
milk they handle? 
* 
Week after week we receive pitiful letters from peo¬ 
ple who have invested money in mines, land schemes, 
or other stock-jobbing concerns. Investigation usually 
shows that their money is lost, and that there never 
was a chance to save it after they let it go. To every 
one who writes for help in such cases there are half 
a dozen who say nothing, rather than be called a 
sucker. When you ask such people why they ever 
tied their money to a wild-cat they usually say, “What 
can you do with it?” Now, nine farmers out of 10 
can invest their money to good advantage right on 
their own farms and in their homes. We doubt if 
there is a practical farm in the country in which $1,000 
or more could not be invested so as to yield six per 
cent or more in clean profit. The following strong 
statement is made by a man who admits that his farm 
is mortgaged, but says that improvements pay better 
than wiping out this mortgage would. 
I think the whole New England farm system was wrong. 
I think Nell Beverly’s system was wrong. By this I 
mean that the New England farmer has been too afraid 
to go into debt and too eager to lay by a little in the 
village hank. To-day the farmer who has 100 or 200 
acres of land and cannot make his spare money pay him 
better than six per cent interest invested in improvement of 
that farm is a fool; yet the farmer who scrapes a few 
hundred dollars and puts it in a savings bank at three 
or four per cent interest is looked upon as a great fellow 
by most of his neighbors. 
That is not a sound doctrine for general preaching. 
It depends upon the man. Easy borrowing has been 
the ruin of thousands of men who thought they had 
the ability to handle money and yet lacked it. If 
yon could have held them down to a cash basis and 
made them shun debt as they would a pestilence, they 
would have succeeded. The number of men in the 
ordinary walks of life who can really handle borrowed 
money to advantage is very small. “Nell Beverly’s” 
plan of farming was the only plan by which that family 
could have been held together. Yet the “New Eng¬ 
land farm system” was wrong in the idea of squeez¬ 
ing money out of the farm and sending it away for 
investment. We see one result of this from what the 
Hope Farm man tells us. That farm money went 
West and helped develop the farms which, later, nearly 
wrought the agricultural ruin of New England. Now 
it is coming back for investment on those very farms 
which it formerly sucked dry. Let us think what a 
different story would now be told if this money had 
been put into improvements on the farms from which 
it was taken. The best place for your imestments is 
right on your own farm. Every farmer who helps 
prove that by his own results adds to the character 
and reputation of farming as a business. 
BREVITIES. 
Who can tell us of experience in feeding gluten meal to 
horses ? 
Whenever you lose your temper you put a fearful curse 
upon the persou who finds it. 
That farmers’ institute ought to be not a place for en¬ 
tertainment, but a school for farmers. 
Why ever register a bull out of a poor cow—even if 
it be a purebred. There may be hope for a daughter of such 
a cow, hut very little for her son. 
A recent advertisement called for a healthy man willing 
to give blood for transfusing into the veins of an invalid. 
Nearly 100 men offered themselves. 
I think the wonder about the “Wonderberry” was 
‘I wonder if they will bite,’ and the dear people bit 
and were bitten,” says J. Iv., a Florida reader. 
We pay 25 cents for seven pounds of ordinary buckwheat 
flour—not self-raising. As the grain is not self-raising 
either, we wonder just how much the farmer gets out of 
our 25 cents. 
It has now been demonstrated beyond question that 
farm soil can be improved and large crops grow by using 
chemicals and green crops alone. This may not be the 
best way, hut it is possible. 
“I am a young man ; I keep a list of N. G.’s,” thus writes 
a New York farmer. One of the best things he can do 
is to put down in a book the name of every fake 
exposed in The R. N.-Y". with a few notes about the case. 
Before long he will have one of the most useful volumes 
in his library. 
The French Colonial authorities are said to he trying 
to introduce zebu beef from Madagascar into the home 
market. The zebu, or Indian ox, is abundant in Mada¬ 
gascar. and it is said that 4,500,000 of these animals 
now exist in the plateau lands. The first shipment of 
this beef sold in Taris realized a good price. 
