168 
American Agriculturist, September 8,1923 
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A-9-8 
Name_ 
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_R. D., 
State, 
Dealer’s Name . 
Address_ 
SKINNER APPLE and PEACH SIZER 
t\ \\r 1 f r<« *« «• Compact, convenient and less ex- 
Does Work OI rive Machines, pensive to install and operate. 
Combines self-feeding hopper, roller grading belt, 
cull belt, sizer, distributing system. Dependable, 
thorough, widely used by experienced packers. 
Built by World’s 
largest manufacturers of 
packing house machinery. 
Writs for detailed information 
SKINNER MACHINERY CO., Fourth St., DUNEDIN, FLORIDA 
I have a chance to sell by mail at my usual LOW 
^ j PRICES the output of a well-known silo concern. Silos 
absolutely first-class, made of genuine CLEAR FIR. 
This lumber is high-priced and hard to get this year but 
YOU KNOW it is the ONLY SAFE wood for silos, if you buy 
through me DIRECT FROM THE FACTORY you can BUY THE BEST 
and PAY LESS. Your neighbor probably bought at my sale last year. Ask him how much 
he saved. This sale lasts 30 days. M. L. SMITH, 112 Flood Bldg., MEADVILLE, PA. 
Cut Down Acreage 
A Time For Sanity and Sane Thinking 
J. VAN WAGENEN, JR. 
E VERY period of By J. VAN WAGENEN, JR. pie, some 
economic distress — 
among farmers such as we are just 
now passing through, brings to the 
surface a lot of loose thinking, and 
foolish talk, and impossible demands, 
and silly economic theories, mainly tak¬ 
ing the form of legislative panaceas. 
It was about 
twenty - seven 
years ago (I can¬ 
not verify the ex- 
act date) when 
Coxey and his 
grotesque “army” 
made his famous 
“march” on 
Washington. It 
was a spectacu¬ 
lar, half-ridicu¬ 
lous, half-pitiful 
protest against a 
long period of ag¬ 
ricultural “hard 
times” which 
reached their 
lowest depths 
about the middle 
of that bad dec¬ 
ade, 1890 to 1900. With all due re¬ 
spect to present troubles, I still insist 
that any farmer who “came through” 
that period and lived to tell the tale 
is entitled to smile an amused, superior 
sort of smile when our present agricul¬ 
tural depression is referred to. Those 
years, when all over our State the ship¬ 
ping stations 
paid 44 CentS per 
forty-quart can . ” - - - - 
of milk (the fat 
test was not yet 
generally intro- 
duced), and 
when in butter 
and cheese it 
brought even 
less, established 
a low quotation 
which no one 
ever expects to 
see again dupli¬ 
cated. Lest I 
seem to claim 
glory for myself 
as having lived 
through that 
period, let me 
hasten to add 
that it was my 
good father—not 
I—who was bear¬ 
ing the burden and doing the worrying. 
These were the years that begat the 
“16 to 1” craze and various other eco¬ 
nomic vagaries. 
However, let us grant that the three 
years past have been bad enough, and 
much worse in the West than with us. 
We men of the East are fortunate in 
that we never really lost our heads 
over land values during those two or 
three boom years. As we know, the 
Corn Belt indulged in a wild spree of 
buying, and selling, and trading, and 
marking up the price of lands, and be¬ 
cause after it is over, thousands of men 
find themselves saddled with farms for 
which they promised to pay fictitious 
prices, the present depression comes 
all the harder. By the way, these men 
are not wholly to blame. Many claim¬ 
ing to be much wiser than they, also 
had visions, and dreamed dreams. Even 
before the war, James J. Hill, famous 
as a railroad present and speechmaker, 
furnished scare headlines about an im¬ 
pending food shortage in America, a 
prophecy that seems particularly ab¬ 
surd in the light of subsequent events. 
Then an almost equally well-known 
banker-economist electrified his audi¬ 
ence by declaring in so many words 
that within ten years every acre of 
good land in America would be worth 
not less than $500. I judge we must 
have all been more or less bitten by 
the same bug, for I do not remember 
that when I read this statement I rec¬ 
ognized its folly. 
In any case, events have demon¬ 
strated that our hindsight is much bet¬ 
ter than our foresight. And here am 
I, adding yet more words to the mil¬ 
lions that have been written concern¬ 
ing our agricultural readjustment. 
Just now there is a topic that has 
broken into all ranks of society and is 
learnedly discussed by all sorts of peo- 
Farm Follies of 1923 
E VERY day lately some new theoidst 
bursts into the headlines with 
another scheme for saving the farm¬ 
ers. To all such and to any of the 
few farmers who might believe in 
them, we refer the article on this page 
by Jared Van Wagenen, Jr. Out of the 
volumes that have been written on 
hard times of farmers, this is the most 
sensible, and practical discussion that 
we have seen. Remember, that the 
next time you hear some one tell just 
what is the matter with farming, he 
probably “would not know a wheat 
field from an onion patch.”—The 
Editors. 
of whom 
would not know a 
wheatfield from an onion patch—viz. 
the price of wheat. Wheat is conspicu¬ 
ously the sick man of our agriculture. 
It surely behaves badly enough. Re¬ 
cently it has fallen not only to pre¬ 
war prices but worse than that. One 
must go back nearly fifteen years to 
find the parallel. Then, at Kansas City 
recently wheat and corn sold at the 
same price. So wheat has succeeded in 
getting on the front page of the daily 
papers, and such leading magazines as 
the “Outlook” give it the place of honor 
on the editorial page. 
Now, so far as the East is concerned, 
this disaster to wheat is not directly 
a very important matter. Only about 
a half dozen New York counties grow 
wheat enough to cut any real figure in 
their agriculture. The State, as a 
whole, is most interested ’in having 
cheap wheat for chickens and the by¬ 
products for the cows. 
More than other grains, wheat tends 
to be grown in the remote corners of 
the world and by the States on our ag¬ 
ricultural frontier. There is a far 
larger portion of the world where 
wheat is successfully grown than corn, 
and the really high-priced land in the 
United States is the corn, rather than 
the wheat belt. The fact that wheat 
has such a wide range of adaptibility, 
both as to temperature and rainfall, 
is one of the reasons why it has 
chronically hard 
going in the 
-- world. Wheatl 
constitutes less 
than 7 per cent 
of our total agri¬ 
cultural produc¬ 
tion and, as a 
whole, a depres¬ 
sion in wheat 
prices is much 
less serious than 
with corn. Still, 
to the popular 
non-agricult ural 
mind, there is 
something ex- 
trao r d i n a r y in 
the over-producH 
tion. of the grain, 
which by common 
consent is the 
_______—--. bread grain of 
all peoples just 
as soon as their 
economic condition will permit them to 
use it in place of the cheaper cereals. 
* Now, it needs no international con¬ 
gress of learned doctors of either eco¬ 
nomics or agriculture to determine just 
what is the matter with wheat. Facts 
are that under the stimulus of high 
prices, together with a good deal of 
“grow more wheat”’ propaganda, the 
larger part of the wheat-growing world 
speeded up production and had not yet 
slackened up fast enough to accommo¬ 
date itself to post-war conditions. Al¬ 
ways in America we grow more wheat 
than we can use for bread, and, broad¬ 
ly speaking, the price at which the 
surplus can be sold determines the 
price for the entire crop. This year 
it is said that there is from 160,000,000 
to 250,000,000 bushels (I take the mini¬ 
mum and maximum estimates) that 
must be sold abroad, and when it gets 
there, it must be sold to the highest 
bidder in competition with the wheat 
from Argentina, and Australia, and 
Canada, and India, and the Balkan 
States. 
Some statisticians say that even 
Russia, generally supposed to be out 
of the game for some years to come, 
will be found adding her quota to an 
already overstocked market. 
What are we going to do about this 
situation? Well, for one thing, we are 
already planning a fairly radical re¬ 
duction in our acreage. The prelimin¬ 
ary reports to the United States De¬ 
partment of Agiculture indicate a re¬ 
duction of the winter wheat acreage of 
more than 15 per cent. This comes 
about not as the result of any studied 
propaganda, but simply because farm¬ 
ers do rather rapidly adapt themselves 
to changing market conditions. This 
is sound economics and as it should 
be. Then we ought to recognize that 
there is nothing sacred about wheat 
Uh'UlM'ftWt 4U .1 i. 
