940 
The Rural New-Yorker 
THE BUSINESS FARMER'S PAPER 
A National Weekly Journal for Country ami Suburban Homes 
Established iSSO 
1‘; Wished weekly by (he Rural Publishing Company, 333 West 3«th Sireel, beir Vork 
Herbert W. Colt.int.wood, President and Editor. 
John J. Dillon, Treasurer and General Manager. 
Wm. F. Dillon, Secretary. Mrs. E. T. Hoyle, Associate Editor. 
SUBSCRIPTION : ONE DOLLAR A YEAR 
To foreign countries in the Universal Postal Union. 82.04. equal to 8s. Cd. or 
81$ marks, or 104* francs. Remit in money order, express 
order, personal check or bank draft. 
Entered at New York Post Otllce as Second Class Matter 
Advertising rates, 75 cents per agate line—7 words. 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 respon¬ 
sible person. We use every possible precaution and admit the advertising of 
reliable houses only. But to make doubly sure, we will make good any loss 
to paid subscribers sustained by trusting any deliberate swindler, irrespon¬ 
sible advertisers or misleading advertisements in our columns, and any 
such swindler will be publicly exposed. We are also often called upon 
to adjust differences or mistakes between our subscribers and honest, 
responsible houses, whether advertisers or not. We willingly use our good 
offices to this end, but such cases should not be confused with dishonest 
transactions. We protect subscribers against rogues, but we will not bo 
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 time of 
the transaction, and to identify' it, you should mention Tiik Rural New- 
Yorker when writing the advertiser 
“It really goes without saying that you can't save 
daylight before daylight.” 
HAT comes from the argument for daylight 
saving by Mr. Marks on the next page. Every¬ 
one will agree with that, but does Mr. Marks 
realize that this is just what the farmer is expected 
to do? For several months during “daylight saving” 
the farmer is compelled to get up so early that he 
must use artificial light in order to do his work. 
Why ask the farmer to do what is called impossible 
for city men? Possibly Mr. Marks and others have 
read the statements about lighting the henhouses at 
four o’clock so as to get more work from the hens 
—and applied the principle to humans! We know 
of cases under the new time where farm women are 
breaking down for lack of sleep. They lose an hour 
in the cool of the morning and find it impossible to 
sleep in the heat of early evening. The farmer is 
called upon to increase the supplies of food, yet as 
we know in our own case this law will prevent the 
farmer from working his farm with full efficiency. 
Personally, we think there is greater danger of a 
shortage of food this year than there was last season. 
* 
T HERE has been a great shortage of good teach¬ 
ers, especially for rural schools. Many teachers 
joined the Army or took up war work of some sort. 
Others were attracted by other lines of work. There 
are a number of older teachers who left the school¬ 
room some years ago, to make homes of their own. 
They are very capable, and with the added experi¬ 
ence of family life, would give fine service in rural 
districts. How can they he found and introduced to 
school officers who need them? The R. N.-Y. offers 
its services in helping to locate teachers and schools. 
We see no good reason why a teacher should not ad¬ 
vertise for a position, the same as a hired man or 
farm manager. At any rate, if you will let us know 
your wants, either for a teacher or for a school, we 
will try to help. 
■8 
I N the early part of the war a movement was start¬ 
ed to bring large numbers of Belgian children to 
this country, where they could be located in Amer¬ 
ican homes. At first thought the plan seemed plausi¬ 
ble, but a little investigation showed that the Bel¬ 
gian people as a rule did not want their children sent 
away. They knew that every Belgian would be need¬ 
ed at home to repair the terrible damages of war 
and in order to maintain the integrity of the nation. 
Time has shown that they were right. The surface 
of Belgium has been torn and ripped and disfigured, 
and its property destroyed or stolen, but its people 
have returned, and are now making over their coun¬ 
try. Spring has come to that land of small farms, 
and even the ruins are beginning to smile once more. 
Those who were so anxious to deport the Belgian 
children did not understand the spirit and love of 
the land in the heart of the Belgian farmers. As is 
the case with the French farmer, the land calls them 
back as the magnet attracts the iron. This is the 
strongest and safest element in human society. It is 
what we need above all else in America. It was 
what we had in the olden days before the domination 
of the city. 
* 
T HE scourge of influenza last Fall and Winter 
had a great effect upon the insurance business. 
It nearly ruined some of the fraternal societies, and 
they were forced to make heavy assessments. The 
general insurance business had a great “boom.” 
This scourge brought the fear of death home to 
thousands who had scarcely considered it before, and 
The RURAL NEW-YORKER 
they made haste to insure their lives. The wet 
weather is having something of the same effect in 
making farmers see the necessity of drainage. A 
good outfit of tile drainage is crop insurance against 
such a season as we are now having. There are 
many cases where hundreds of acres are standing 
idle—too wet to plow, or carrying a feeble, yellow 
crop. Yet right in the midst of this desolation will 
be found a farm where the oats and barley and 
wheat are thrifty and beautiful. This farm has 
been drained. While around it the soil is clogged 
and useless, the tiles have taken the surplus water 
out of this farm and left it in better shape as a re¬ 
sult of the wet season. That is what you call crop 
insurance. Drainage not only improves the land in 
wet weather, but also helps it in drought. There 
are very few acres in the Eastern States that would 
not be benefited by tile drainage. Some years ago 
The R. N.-Y. started the proposition that a good 
farmer should give his farm a degree of LL.D.—lime, 
legumes and drainage. 
* 
S EVERAL readers have written us lately about 
various propositions for selling day-old chicks 
guaranteed to be 98 per cent pullets! In practically 
every case it is impossible to find the person who 
fills the order. The “guarantee” is that if the chicks 
do not turn out 9S per cent pullets the seller will buy 
back the cockerels! This is not explained until the 
buyer finds he has some cockerels in his flock. At 
the present high price of poultry it is easy to buy 
the cockerels. There is nothing to the scheme of 
guaranteeing the sex of day-old chicks. 
•• . •* • * 
* 
M OfeT of us have read many thousand words 
about the law of “supply and demand.” Some 
of us have thought that this law was as fixed as 
the daily habit of the sun—before the daylight 
savers tried to reform it. Sooner or later we all 
get a jar over this, yet most of us keep right on 
supplying the demand for “suckers” and “good 
things.” For example—wheat and flour. We are 
told day after day about the immense wheat crop 
and the danger of having too much food—and still 
flour goes up and up in price! It is with live stock, 
though, that tlfis supply and demand theory eats 
itself up. In the West the packers and commission 
men have a wonderful system. They know just how 
much each man has and the quality. They also 
understand about what the feeding cost. When an 
out-of-town buyer comes in he knows all these things 
in advance. A certain Western feeder had a fine 
lot of lambs. The market was demoralized. Tfie 
agent of a packer came and offered a little over 
$12.50 per hundred. It was a ruinous pi-ice—less 
than the stock had cost. Rather than take it a 
shipment of some of the lambs was made to a city 
commission house—but in the name of a local buyer. 
There they sold for $35 and were bought bv the 
packer who had offered the lower price! The 
packer’s agents learned about this, and supply and 
demand got go?ng promptly. A local shipper wrote 
asking about a market for the rest of those lambs. 
The reply contained the following contribution to 
(he supply and demand theory: 
“ Don't you offer this man more than $12 for his 
lambs. He is in for a trimming, and hr trill g< t it 
whenever his lambs reach market—no matter where 
he ships. He has had too many good years already.” 
The law of supply and demand! Will some of the 
economists who still profess to believe in it tell how 
to apply it in this case? 
* 
W E believe it has now been surely demonstrated 
that the dry spray or dust for killing eating 
fruit insects is successful. We meet fruit growers 
who insist that there can be no substitute for the 
liquid sprays, and we have no argument with them. 
Some years ago very successful fruit men told us 
that the entire theory of spraying with poisons to 
kill the fruit worm was impracticable. They said 
that a flock of sheep or a drove of hogs in the or¬ 
chard would prove the only practical method. It 
was not necessary to argue with them. Time is the 
great convincing debater, and the poisoning method 
grew away from theory and became fact. Time is 
also to put the dust method where it belongs. We 
believe there are times in every orchard when the 
ability to put on the dust at just the right time would 
save time and money. While we think the dust will 
kill some of the young scales at the time they are 
hatching and crawling, its chief business is to kill 
the eating insects. The nfcxt development-in-spray- 
Jnne 7, 1919 
machinery should be a combination sprayer and 
duster. We see no reason why the same power may 
not he used to work the pump or the fan, as desired. 
The tank could be taken off and the duster put in its 
place at will, and thus make one machine serve a 
double purpose. 
■K 
T HE wet season has made fit impossible to carry 
out our own farm work just as we planned it. 
There is a certain limit of time for planting particu¬ 
lar farm crops, and when, through no fault of the 
farmer, this period passes, he will do better to plant 
something else if he can. In our own case, part of 
the land is still so wet that we cannot hope for a 
full crop of sweet corn on it. So we plan to seed mil¬ 
let, buckwheat or barley instead. This saves the cost 
of cultivation, and will give us a full crop of small 
grain and fodder. While these crops will not bring 
as much as full crops of sweet corn, they save labor, 
and the net income will be larger than that from a 
poor crop of corn. Every farmer must decide such 
things for himself, but we should not try to dog 
through the full Spring program when Nature puts 
up the flag on us. 
* 
W E know a "longshoreman” in this city. Ilis 
work is unloading or loading the cargo of 
vessels. He simply carries boxes, bags and barrels 
between the ship and the truck. There is little if 
any brain work about it—simply heavy manual labor. 
Much of the freight this man carries is food or 
fiber—flour, potatoes, grain, cotton or wool. These 
are farm products made useful and available through 
the labor which farmers have put into them. Now 
this handler is paid Go cents per hour for his labor, 
and $1 per hour for Sunday work! What do you 
think of it? From $6.50 to $8 per day for merely 
lifting and handling farm products! The farmer 
who produces them made barely 25 cents an hour for 
his labor; less than that if you figure on interest on 
his invested capital! This “longshoreman” belongs 
to a union. During the recent strike we asked him 
how things were going. His answer was, “I don’t 
know. Just as soon as the union says work, I work. 
Until then I do nothing. I sell my labor, and ire 
have got to do a wholesale business in the labor mar¬ 
ket! Where would we be if each man worked for 
himself?” 
* 
T HREE weeks ago we printed an article on “The 
Confessions of a Profiteer.” It was a genuine 
human document, and hundreds of our readers knew 
from sad experience that it \yas true. One of our 
people. Mr. B. K. Field, sent this article to the New 
York Tribune with a note in which he said: 
Few city people realize these things, or if they do 
are pleased to ignore them. Can you make use of the 
inclosed article, to bring before the minds of your 
readers some of the problems which the farmer finds 
himself compelled to face, but which he cannot solve 
without the help of the city man? 
The farmer is not a profiteer. Far be it from such ; 
his balance is all too often on the wrong side of the 
sheet. All he asks is fair treatment, and not misrepre¬ 
sentation. 
And the Tribune printed the entire article! This 
is good work of a kind that will help us all. 
Brevities 
Wilt, you give us your plain unvarnished opinion 
about physical culture in our country schools? 
At a Colorado tractor demonstration on June 31, 
100 machines will work and plow up 2.700 acres! 
Of course you will remember that corn smut cannot 
be prevented by treating the seed—like oats or wheat. 
I know a man who blows his own horn so much that 
he has come to think it finer music than the finest band. 
Can a man who cannot hear and forbear with his 
neighbor hope to succeed in a large co-operative society? 
In buying chicken manure we figure that it is worth 
four times as much as fair stable manure, figured by 
weight. 
From the way the season starts we think there is 
greater danger of a shortage of fuel this year than there 
was last. 
No. there will be no danger in using as food for 
human or beast potatoes or grain that have been treated 
with formalin t<> kill smut or scab. 
We have many complaints this Spring about oats 
and Spring wheat turning yellow and standing still. 
In most eases the need is for available nitrogen. The 
remedy-ie-nitr^te of-soda or manure. _ •' -1 
