274 
THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
thoory that the production of food was unchangeable, like the 
tides or the coming of day and night, and that nothing that was 
done with the food after it was grown could increase or decrease 
the growing of food. That theory is wholly mistaken. Very 
much to the contrary, everything that is done to conserve food, 
to regulate price, to restrict use, to promote saving, .has its 
direct effect on production. Food is a commodity, and the law 
of supply and demand, when not repealed by monopoly, applies to 
food as it does to any other commodity. Conservation measures 
affect demand. Therefore they must influence supply, or produc- 
tirtn also. The farmer determines what he is going to grow next 
year, subject to the demands of his rotation, by the success he 
has had with the things he grew last year. He is in business to 
make money. Therefore, he will grow most of what pays best, 
and he cannot do otherwise. 
Take the matter of milk, for example. Whatever reduces the 
consumption of- milk tends to result in less milk for those who 
need it instead of more. The farmer must milk his cow daily. 
If, because of any “Save the Milk” campaign, the demand for his 
milk is cut off, in self-defense he must cut off the supply. He 
cannot produce milk at a loss. He cannot turn a tap, and hold 
his milk for a later market. So he reduces supply to the level of 
demand by selling the cow to the butcher. But if the demand 
increases at a living price, he will keep his cow and raise more. 
The more consumption of mdlk is stimulated, the greater will 
production be, and the more consumption is reduced, the less the 
supply of this best and cheapest of animal foods for all of us. 
A “Save the Milk” campaign is a blunder into which only a city 
mind could fall. 
Chickens, potatoes, veal, lamb, and other produce might like¬ 
wise be cited to show how the conservation of a farm product has 
an immediate and direct influence on the production of it, and 
how wise and skillful a hand is needed to deal successfully with 
the amazingly sensitive and pervasive relation between agricul¬ 
tural production and the conservation of agricultural products. 
The first thing to be done in preparing for a crop in 1919 
large enough to meet our foreknown needs is then to wipe out the 
artificial wall which has been created between food production, 
which has been assigned to the Department of Agriculture, and 
food conservation, which the Food Administration supervises and 
controls. If actual consolidation is impracticable, then at least 
such co-operation should be enforced between them as will ef¬ 
fectually prevent the taking of any conservation measure until 
farm experts have considered and approved it in relation to pro¬ 
duction. 
The second thing is to see that the farmer has the means with 
which to produce. Of these, the most important is labor. Man 
power in agriculture has exactly the same value as man power in 
war. Since neither high school boys, nor failures from the slums, 
nor casuals from the streets, nor women on vacation can supply 
the year-long need of the American farmer for skilled labor, 
since even before the war began farm labor was probably 10 per 
cent short, since more than a quarter of our National Army is 
composed of skilled farm workers, and since it is not easy to 
grow more crops with less men, the labor situation is critical. 
Normally, Uiere is about one farm laborer to every two farms 
in the United States. We cannot feed our people and our Allies 
without the farmer’s hired man, but farm help is hard to find and 
hard to hold. As a rule, the farm laborer has small pay, long 
hours, complicated tools, and, therefore, the necessity for very 
high skill in handling them. He does a great many different 
things, and he must do them with skill or not at all. Then he is 
often quite isolated; he suffers from exposure to heat and cold; 
he has no holidays and very few pleasures; and he can get better 
pay and easier hours elsewhere. It must be made worth while 
for farm hands to work on the farm. 
The government must give the farmer reasonable confidence 
that in 1919 he will have labor, that he will have seed, fertilizer, 
farm implements, and credit,—all upon terms that will epable 
him to produce without loss. There is nothing so destructive of 
business enterprise as the lack of confidence, and the American 
farmer has not had confidence this year. It was his patriotism, 
and nothing else, which led him to plant 42,000,000 acres of win¬ 
ter wheat. 
The farmer knows as well as any one that the price of $2.20 a 
bushel for wheat was not fixed in order to guarantee him a high 
price. It was fixed in order to guarantee the city consumer 
against a higher price. The $2.20 limit was not an effort to keep 
the price of wheat up, but a successful effort to keep the price of 
wheiii down. Price fixing of that kind does two things—it dis- 
couragi s production, and it increases consumption,—and these are 
just the two things that, in the face of a scarcity, we cannot afford 
to have done. 1 have no doubt that our acreage of winter wheat 
this year would have been as large as the Department of Agri¬ 
culture asked for, if it had not been for the knowledge of the 
farmers that the price they were getting was being held down 
by artificial re: :riction when the prices they were paying were 
rising at pleasure. As it was, the area planted to winter wheat. 
while very slightly larger than for 1914, was no less than five mil¬ 
lion acres smaller than the Department of Agriculture indicated 
as being necessary to meet the needs of this country and of our 
Allies. That is the essential figure—five million acres less than 
the Department of Agriculture asked for. Comparisons with nor¬ 
mal times are meaningless or misleading now. The true stan¬ 
dard of judgment is what we need how to win the war, not 
what we used to need in peace. 
The farmers raised a great crop last year, at the urging of the 
government. Many of them lost by their patriotic effort because 
the marketing facilities were not properly organized. Men who 
even sent their wives and daughters into the fields found them¬ 
selves at the end of the season very much out of pocket. The 
point is not so much that thy lost money, but that they cannot 
lose money and go on farming. The average farmer in this coun¬ 
try gets only about $$400 cash a year. He cannot keep on farm¬ 
ing if he loses many acres of potatoes, as many and many a 
farmer did in Pennsylvania and other states, when it costs him 
$90 an acre to put those potatoes in. 
The farmer sees that nearly every other producer of the things 
essential for carrying on the war is assured of a profit. He reads 
that at Hog Island the government is furnishing money, putting 
houses, finding labor, and then guaranteeing a definite percen¬ 
tage of return to the men who undertake the work. He reads of 
the same thing in other war Industries. He has heard that the 
government is going to put billions of dollars into such indus¬ 
tries at huge aggregate profits to their promoters. He does not 
want huge profits himself,—well he knows he will not get them— 
but he does want reasonable business security, and it is fair and 
right that he should have it. At present it is denied to him, 
and to him almost alone. 
Finally—and this, I think, is the most essential need in the 
whole situation—the farmer must be taken into partnership in 
the handling of the war. So far as I know there has not been a 
representative of organized farmers in any position of high re¬ 
sponsibility in any organization in Washington charged with the 
conduct of the war. A third of the people of the United States, 
who have been producing food, the admitted first essential for 
the successful conduct of the war, have been denied a voice in 
dealing with the great questions, even the farm questions, which 
concern the war. It does not amount to representation for a 
third of the people of this country to occasionally call a few 
farmers to Washington for a few days, there to tell them what 
has been done and secure their approval. 
The treatment of the organized farmers may well be contrasted 
with the proper recognition that has been given to organized 
labor. A special branch of the Council of National Defence was 
established to represent it, and organized labor has from the be¬ 
ginning been properly recognized and continuously called into 
consultation. All I ask is that the enormous body of organized 
farmers, representing the largest single element among our 
people, supplying a more essential ingredient for the success of 
the war than any other, should themselves have that proper con¬ 
sideration, which is admittedly proper in the case of organized 
workers off the farm, and certainly is no less proper in the case 
of organized workers on the farm. 
The farmer feels deeply that he has been left out. Again and 
again, through the Federal Board of Farm Organizations, he has 
offered his services; again and again he has asked for a working 
partnership in the war; urgently and repeatedly he has called at¬ 
tention to his lack of necessities without which it would be im¬ 
possible for him to carry out as fully as he would like to do the 
duty Avhich the war has imposed upon him. Grudging and merely 
ostensible recognition, and officially inspired reproof have been 
substantially the only results. Now is the time, well in advance 
of the crop of 1919, to call the producers of this country into 
consultation, to see to it that the farmer’s point of view is fairly 
represented in dealing with farm questions, that matters which 
are within the knowledge and the competence of this highly 
trained class of men should no longer be dealt with as they have 
been dealt with hitherto—almost purely from the point of view 
of men who were ignorant of the farmei*’s mind, and apparently 
altogether out of touch with the conditions under which the 
farmer does his work. 
This is my last word. Remember that farmers are just as 
different from city men as city men are different from seamen, 
and that in dealing with farmers, as in dealing with any other 
highly trained and specialized body of men, success depends on 
the use of methods which they understand. This fact the city 
mind seems wholly unable to grasp, and it is the city mind which 
is in charge of this war. The one thing most needful in order 
to secure for the world in 1919 a crop equal to the need we know 
is coming, is to make the farmers of the United States cease to 
feel that they are outsiders in the war, exhorted and preached at 
by men who do not understand them, and to take them into a 
really effective and equal working partnership, and to see that 
they are recognized as partners on that basis in the winning of 
this war for human liberty. 
