Mistakes of Farmers Who Come East 
* 
S ELLING EXPENSIVE LAND.—A little while 
ago I read in the Saturday Evening Post an 
article about the land boom in the Middle West, and 
how farmers there have been selling out during the 
past two or three years at skyrocket prices. It was 
an interesting article, for one reason because it put 
into definite figures a situation that we have all 
known had to come to pass in the corn belt. There 
is a little sequel to that story. Something is, of 
course, happening to a lot of these farmers who are 
selling out their land for from $200 to $400 an acre, 
pulling up with their families, and moving off. Un¬ 
doubtedly a lot of them move to the nearest villages 
and gravitate into the well-known stratum of re¬ 
tired farmers. But there are some of them who are 
following another course. Some of them are com¬ 
ing East and buying the cheaper lands here, think¬ 
ing to settle down with their profits and a farm be¬ 
sides. here to bring up their families and end their 
days. This little sequel to the story is beginning to 
make an impression on us in the East. Old neigh¬ 
borhoods whose families dated well back before 
Civil War days are coming to include many a family 
whose immediate antecedents are all of the corn 
belt. 
THE EASTERN MIGRATION.—Read the reports 
from the big real estate agencies of farms sold dur- 
our Eastern neighborhoods and buy farms which 
local farmers would not take at any price. In the 
language of the bucket-shop dealer, they seem to 
“fall for something” with unexpected ease. This is 
a phenomenon which I cannot understand, yet which 
does come to pass surprisingly often. 1 wonder, per¬ 
haps, if it is not that the whole character of Eastern 
farming is different from what these men have been 
used to. Out in the corn belt the type of farming 
that these men leave is quite generally a grain- 
growing and stock-feeding proposition. When they 
come East they do*not always grasp the fact that we 
do not make our money, as a rule, either by growing 
grain or by feeding hogs or beef. The chief reason 
why we don't is because we can’t. The conditions 
here are different. 
A DAIRY DISTRICT.—Our basic industry is 
dairying. There are several good reasons for this. 
Among them are closeness to the big market milk 
cities, and the fact that the country-wide competition 
of enterprises has eliminated many other things. 
The most general, successful type of farming in the 
Northeast is dairying combined with some one or 
two enterprises. This includes, generally speaking, 
the growing of hay. corn fodder, and a relatively 
Sinaloa mount of grain. All the rules of the game are 
different from what they are in the corn belt. Land, 
fields. He bought a small dairy and started making 
butter, after which he discovered that the local mar¬ 
ket for butter was more than supplied. All in all, he 
did not have a very profitable season the first year, 
and be and his wife were both well disgusted. When 
the second year developed a drought and they were 
able to grow only about half as much as they had 
the first year, they practically suspended operations, 
and my new neighbor became a real estate agent 
He is now selling Eastern farms to other Western 
men and using his place simply as a home. 
ANOTHER DIFFICULT FARM.—Another farm 
not so far away from this, illustrates,somewhat, how 
the agency buying works. This was a farm of 105 
acres, situated only about one-half mile from a thriv¬ 
ing village and on a main macadam road. The land 
was level, the buildings good. Let a man see this 
farm in the Winter and nine chances out of ten he 
would fall in love with it. The real estate agency 
brought its prospective customers there in the Win¬ 
ter. The “nigger in the woodpile” was that this 
farm was also heavy clay land, and was a wet one 
even in a dry year. Drainage was impossible. The 
man who lived on it. to start with, was a carpenter, 
but he got tired of it and listed it with a large farm 
agency. They sold it within three months (in De¬ 
cember) to a farmer from Iowa, for $4,000. When 
A Mammoth Acme Harrow at Work in the Central West. Fig. ,215 
ing 1010. It will give you some idea of how many 
hundred farms in New York, Pennsylvania and New 
England are being sold to Middle Western men. 
'* lie - v liave been coming East almost in droves for 
" u ‘ l’ :ls f two years, ever since war prices and the 
general land boom bega'u in the Middle West. In my 
home neighborhood in New York Slate, 1 was figuring 
" u ‘ other day how niTuiy new farmers we have. 
Wiliin radius of three miles from my farm there 
have been, during the past two years, 12 farms sold 
t0 •'Eddie Western men. At least 10 of these were 
men who had owned good land in the corn belt, li 
•''oh! it off for good money, and had come on East 
"0 (heaper places and settle down to a less siren 
11 ^Ee. I rout talking with those men I gather 
'hat the average price at which they had sold 6 
"as about $ 1 oO an acre. The average price for t 
la nns which they bought in New York was a bo 
• i an .uie. In both cases this included fairly go 
•inklings, i imagine the buildings in the West a 
El' 11 ' H, tler than the opes they have come to. 
'EFFERENT CONDITIONS.—There is still a 1 
'■ ''Miiel to the sequel. It is this point that lias i 
1,1 1110 a number of eases. I have repeated 
1 1111 belt farmers, middle-aged men. and a 
aui "l> men of good average judgment, come in 
markets, labor, climate, social conditions, and all 
the rest are somewhat different. It rather seems to 
me that many of these Western men do not grasp 
this fact, or else the differences seem so slight that 
they do not take full account of them. At all events, 
there are many cases and many stories where these 
men are literally hoodwinked in buying farms. 
A TYPICAL CASE.—A man from Michigan came 
into our neighborhood and bought a place, a farm of 
about 150 acres, and he paid $(5,000 for it. The 
house was an excellent one: the barns just fair. 
But the land he could not know anything about, for 
lie bought it when it was under two feet of snow. 
The most you could tell was that it was fairly 
level: and you could see. of course, how much of it 
was woods and how much cleared land. In the 
Spring lie moved East and took possession. As the 
season opened up he gradually discovered that bis 
farm was very heavy soil: so heavy, in fact, that 
much of it would have made good bricks. It. was 
also highly acid. Several of bis meadows which had 
looked promising so far as the lay of the land went, 
proved to support practically no seeding save paint¬ 
brush. sorrel and ragweed. When he started in to 
plow lie broke a good many plow-points before find¬ 
ing out how many fast stones there were in the 
spring came lie waited for the land to dry out to 
begin plowing, but he waited in vain. Along in the 
latter part of May some of li is fields did dry out 
sufficiently so that be had a little corn and potatoes, 
lie also cut what hay there was, though he was 
never able to get onto the meadows early enough to 
top-dress them with manure. This Iowa man lasted 
two years, lit* then listed the farm with the same 
agency, and they sold it to a man from Missouri for 
$5.0l>0. This second man was apparently quite a 
farmer, lie came on East with a full outfit of tools, 
with 12 horses, a lot of hogs. etc. lie took possesion 
in March. As luck would have it. a wet Summer on 
sued. The man from Missouri waited most all Sum 
mer for a spot dry enough to plant potatoes for the 
family. Ilis cows used to swim to and from pasture. 
He was a man of action, however, and in the Fall 
lie blew up with a choice outburst of profanity, in¬ 
vited bis real estate firm to sell (lie farm for him. 
and departed forthwith for Missouri. His chief com¬ 
ment was that lie wanted to get back to a country 
where they didn’t have to shoe rhe horses. 
A SCHOOL TEACHER TRIES IT.—This house 
stood empty the following Winter until February, 
when the farm again sold to a school teacher from 
Indiana. He was also a farmer, and had sold a farm 
