THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
im 
Bridging the Gap 
Are You in the Nursery Business For Pleasure or for Profit? 
The biggest problem any manufacturer has to face is 
to “get the product over to the public.” 
That is just as true of the manufacturer of nursery 
j)roducts as it is of the maker of a commercial article. 
There are two ways of selling a thing after it’s been 
made. The first is to go to the jiossible consumer and 
ask him to buy; result is, he sets the price. 
The second is, to convince him in advance that he must 
have that product; result is, that he comes to the manu¬ 
facturer or to his distributors, and the manufacturer 
sets the price. 
To illustrate: farm products in general are sold by the 
first plan,—price is based primarily on supply, (with 
have that product; result is, that he comes to the manu- 
’ factured articles in general are sold by the latter plan,— 
price is based primarily on demand, (and cost of produc¬ 
tion and of selling are the chief factors in fixing the 
I price). 
i Which policy has proved the most profitable for those 
} following it? How often in your papers, do you come 
I, across some reference to a millionaire soap king, or 
razor king, or overalls king, or even a hair-tonic king? 
1 But when you read of the wheat kings, and corn kings, 
I and tobacco kings, and cotton kings, reference is not 
■; made to the men who produced those things; but to the 
• 1 men who sold them. The men who produced them sold 
|! according to the first plan, at a jirice fixed by supply. 
I The men who sold those things to the consumer, sold ac- 
! cording to the second jilan, by creating a demand that 
, enabled them to set the price, and that made it possible 
for them to put the jirice where it would at least cover 
cost of production and selling. 
! Can Nurserymen Draw a Moral From Spuds and 
I Talking Machines? 
I Some years ago, when Eastern “capital” had become 
! interested in certain “Bonanza farms” out West, and the 
latter had failed to return any profit on the investment 
I and were being broken uj), a certain magazine sent out 
I a “trained investigator” to find out what the reason was. 
! It the course of his travels the investigator came across 
I a native farmer who was working part of a former bon¬ 
anza farm. 
[ “How is it,” asked the writer, “that you can make a 
’ living in this country, when these big farms, with power 
machinery and expert management and all that, failed?” 
! “Wall, Stranger,” returned the farmer. “I dunno; un¬ 
less it’s becuz there’s only two sure crops in this here 
country—ice and children;—and the small farmer’s got 
i the children!” 
' Undoubtedly the farmer thought he had the best of the 
argument. But did he? The corporation, failing to get 
prices which covered cost of production and selling, quit 
that business. The men who were backing it up. put 
I their money into some line where competition was in 
creating a market, not in underbidding on prices. The 
farmer kept on, working himself and his whole family 
unsparingly, and selling his crops for what was offered, 
with little or no- regard to what they cost him—that be¬ 
ing, in fact, something on which he did not have even 
hazy information. 
The records of the Department of Agriculture at 
Washington are illuminating on the point of prices based 
on supply. What has happened with Irish potatoes is 
one of the fine healthy examples of the let-supply-and- 
demand-take-care-of-it policy. A chart of production 
and prices for forty years shows the most violent flu¬ 
ctuations; big crops and low prices invariably followed 
by small crops and high prices; resulting again in “over 
production,” and low prices. Frequently in big crop years 
the entire crop brought less than a much smaller crop the 
year previous; and in many sections large percentages 
of the crop would not be dug at all—the potato-growers 
“bmsh-pile!” 
But “over-production,” in the sense it has been used, 
hasn’t meant the production of more potatoes than the 
country could have used, at a fair price. It has merely 
meant the production of more than the growers could 
sell, under normal, undeveloped market demands, with¬ 
out bidding against each other on price. And when that 
condition was reached, “The bottom dropped out” of the 
market, and potatoes left the producer’s hands at less 
than cost of production. 
“But in the years when prices were good, and there 
was a fair profit, didn’t the growers, realizing how much 
it would mean to them to have a demand big enough to 
move their next crop at the same price, even if it was a 
bigger crop, do something to stimulate the demand for 
])otatoes? Wouldn’t that have been a sensible thing to 
do?” 
Do I hear some gentle reader propounding the above 
question? Ar-rah g’wanl, G. R. Folks who grow things 
out of the soil, don’t do business that way! 
Millions to Create Demand—Not a Thing to Fill it With! 
Well, not all business is left to the mercies of chance 
“demand.” There are some business men who have 
gained the reputation of being pretty shrewd, who value 
“created demand” so highly tliat for three years they 
have been spending real cash money to keep on creating 
it, even though they had not a thing to sell! 
Take, as specific examples, the manufacturers of ci¬ 
garettes, automobiles, and phonographs. With the en¬ 
tire output of their factories, either in their regular pro¬ 
ducts or on special war work, contracted for by the Gov¬ 
ernment, nevertheless they have continued to S])end hun¬ 
dreds of thousands of dollars monthly to create demand 
for future business. And at the time they were spending 
it, it looked as if that business might be years in the fu- 
ture! 
The potato-grower—representative of those who pro- 
