THE FARMER’S TROUBLES.
The average American farmer is one of the best fellows in the world. He
also is one of the most unfortunate.
He generally comes to his profession by accident. He may not have meant
to become a farmer, but through death, or change of family, or some
other circumstance entirely out of his own control, he comes in
possession of the family estates, almost certainly encumbered with
mortgages, and must continue the family business to secure a living for
himself. From the first he is doomed to loneliness, which is one of the
worst curses that humanity can suffer. He cannot afford to employ help,
for if he had capital he would not be a farmer, and it requires capital
to secure proper assistance in the conduct of a farm. He must do all of
his work himself. If he cannot do it, it must remain undone. As a rule
the farmers of the United States are awake long before daylight in the
morning, and their work continues long after dark in the evening. The
working hours of the day, which to the
[Illustration: TACOMA BUILDING.]
ordinary laborer are ten hours, and to more favored classes eight or
seven, or even six, are to the farmer as a rule at least fourteen in
twenty-four. His work is never done, any more than woman’s.
As a natural consequence he always is tired out. Custom and the demand
of the markets restrict him generally to a single crop. Whether this be
wheat, or corn, or oats, the seeding time is comparatively short. So is
harvest time. The farm is larger than any one man or family can possibly
manage, but American demand being at present only for raw materials, he
has no choice. He must plant the staples from which foreign countries
are willing to purchase the surplus for cash. Otherwise his condition
would be worse than that of a slave. It is very hard for any one man to
“break up” more than one acre of ground per day with a good team of
horses. What, therefore, can the single-handed American farmer, who owns
a hundred and sixty acres of ground, the customary “quarter section,”
expect to do with his immense estate? To properly care for his family he
should plant all of it; but, except in the case of wheat, if he were to
plant it all, one-half to three-fourths of the crop would be wasted
through lack of necessary cultivation. His horse is like himself, an
overworked animal. In any section of the country the farmer is regarded
safe who owns a pair of good horses. But animals working twenty-six
days per month from sunrise to sunset in the long days of summer cannot
be kept up to their work by any amount of feeding or care. Sooner or
later one or the other of a span of horses may break down, and then the
farmer is helpless unless he has money in hand with which to purchase a
substitute. Not ten farmers thus fortunate can be found in any
contiguous hundred.
For the farmer is always poor. If it were otherwise he would not be a
farmer. A very little experience on the farm and less observation of men
about him show him that there is more money in mechanical or mercantile
business, to say nothing of other callings, than his own. But he is
handicapped from the start, no matter if he begins young, and while he
still is a bachelor. When he has a family on his hands he is simply
helpless so far as the possibility of change goes. The average farmer
lives in hopes that in time his children, of whom he generally has many,
will be of some assistance to him. Frequently his hopes are apparently
fulfilled for a short time. But children are not as steady as grown
people. They roam about in any time which they have to themselves. They
reach the villages. They learn of a life which contains less toil and
more comforts than that to which they are accustomed, and one by one
they begin to intimate a desire for a change. It is utterly out of
nature for the farmer to disregard this desire. No matter how much he
may love their company he knows in his inmost heart that a change from
farm life to some sphere of activity which is less exacting would be a
benefit to them physically and mentally, possibly morally also. His sons
endeavor to become salesmen in stores, or to be clerks in lawyers’
offices, or solicitors for one business enterprise or another--anything
to avoid the persistent and wearing drudgery of the farm. His daughters,
in spite of the boasted independence of the farmer, and of his family,
are very easily persuaded to go into any factory that there may be in
the vicinity. It is not that they love home less, but they love
companionship more, and, being like human beings everywhere else, they
are keenly sensitive to the cheering influence of money--real cash
received once a week instead of a possible balance to the family’s
credit at the village store at the end of the year.
For the American farmer is generally at the mercy of the trader. The
trader is as good as the average merchant, and is practically a merchant
in all respects. He is generally the keeper of a general store at which
the farmer during the year purchases everything which he may need for
his family on an open account; with the understanding that when his
crops are made they shall be turned over to the merchant, and a general
balance struck. When there is a good year the result may be in favor of
the farmer, but good years are not the rule in the United States, even
though the country is, as is said, the garden of the world. People who
work and strain their energies to the uttermost require more in the way
of ordinary creature comforts than those whose lives are more regular,
and, though the farmer may discuss prices with great earnestness with
the local merchant, the end is practically the same: he purchases
whatever his family wants, so long as he can have it “charged.” He must
purchase at the price stipulated by the merchant, for it is utterly
impossible for him to look anywhere else for what he may need.
Some newspapers have made sensational complaints of the system of
peonage to which some southern blacks or freedmen have been reduced by
the storekeepers of plantations since slavery days, but there is no
practical difference between their condition and that of the farmers the
country over. “The borrower is servant to the lender,” and the man who
has no money with which to purchase must submit to the exactions of
whoever is willing to extend credit to him. Farmers’ notes are in the
market in almost every county of the United States, and frequently those
of which sell at the lowest prices are drawn by men of whose honesty of
purpose and intention to pay no one has the slightest doubt. The only
reason is that the farmer’s absolute necessities have been in excess of
the cash value of his farm products.
It is customary to speak of the farmer’s life as being the happiest and
the safest occupation in the world. Nearly every one knows of some one
successful farmer, and bases his judgment upon his knowledge of that
solitary individual. But facts are stubborn things, and they have been
proved by figures in the United States in a manner that should make
those who are envious of the farmer think again.
According to the last census report the average valuation of the
farm-lands of the United States, including buildings, was less than
twenty dollars per acre. The average value of the products was less than
eight dollars per acre. A quarter section of land, which is the ordinary
size of an American farm in the States most devoted to agriculture, is a
hundred and sixty acres. The reader may cipher out his own inferences
with very little trouble, remembering that groceries, medicines,
clothing, and everything else not produced by the farm costs quite as
much in the rural districts as in the large cities, and generally a
great deal more.
It has been said that the gold produced in the mining districts of the
United States has cost far more in labor and physical loss than its
value amounted to. The cost of the farm-land in the United States leaves
the apparent waste on gold in absolute insignificance. There are
thousands of American farms to-day, probably hundreds of thousands, of
which the land under the hammer would not bring as much money as the
fences of those same farms have cost. The expense of clearing wooded
land to fit it for agriculture has been far greater in almost every
section of the country than the value of the land at the highest price
prevailing would repay. The work of fencing and clearing was done by
other generations, who got less from their farms than the present
occupants are receiving.
One of the favorite arguments of men who urge younger men to go West and
take a farm and grow up with the country is, that they will never lack
for plenty to eat. This statement is entirely true. A man can always
have plenty of food from his own estate if he cultivates it at all, or
has any live stock. But one accompanying fact is, and this fact should
be carefully considered--that frequently he has no place at which to
market at a profit what he produces. He is so far from any market that
what he does not eat he frequently is obliged to waste. Corn in the ear
has been used during many winters for fuel in portions of the West, not
because there was no wood to be had, but because there was no convenient
place at which to market the corn, even at the bare expense of shelling
and hauling to market, to say nothing of the previous cost of planting,
cultivation, and harvesting. Where a farmer is near a market, as in some
eastern States, his table is no better set than that of the
cheapest-paid mechanic in the city. He may have eighty acres of wheat,
but if his family wishes to eat a cabbage they are obliged to go to some
village market and purchase it; the farmer himself has not had time to
plant and cultivate it. Summer boarders find fewer vegetables in the
country than in the city.
The natural question occurs, why does not the farmer change his business
as hundreds of thousands of mechanics and other men are doing every
year? The answer is that it is impossible for him to do so. He cannot
leave his farm without ruin to his family, for to neglect to plant and
cultivate is to lose the credit upon which in ninety-nine cases in a
hundred he must subsist. He cannot sell his farm at auction under the
hammer as if it were a city house or a village residence, for purchasers
of farms are the rarest of all purchasers of real-estate in the United
States. This is not in accordance with European precedent or
supposition, but it has been demonstrated in every State, and almost
every county of the Union.
Does all this mean that farming will not pay? No. Farming will pay if
backed by capital as well as practical knowledge. But it is almost
impossible that the American farmer of the present generation shall
have any capital from any source whatever. Farming, when conducted
intelligently, can be made profitable in any portion of the United
States by a man with sufficient money in his pocket. Hiram Sibley, one
of the most remarkable men whom the United States ever produced, was, at
the time of his death, in 1888, managing four hundred different farms in
nine different States of the Union, conducting all through
correspondence, and he made it his boast, in which undoubtedly he was
honest, that from each of these farms he secured a profit. But Sibley
was a millionaire twenty times over, probably forty times. Whatever his
farms needed they could have at once, and at the lowest market price,
for he always had cash to pay for whatever he wanted. Nevertheless, this
successful farmer, this millionaire, this thorough-going man of
business, said, to the day of his death, that there was no more pitiable
character in the United States than the farmer.
Nobody knows more about any one special business than the man who does
not have to attend to its details, so there is a widespread opinion and
assertion that the trouble with the farmer is that he is improvident.
Men call attention to the expenses, apparently unnecessary, which he is
continually making, particularly in the direction of comforts and even
luxuries for his family. But what can the farmer do? Everywhere east of
the Mississippi river he is near a village. His children go to school
with those of the village. They learn of comforts and luxuries to which
they are not accustomed at home. They talk about them. They think about
them. They long for them. The farmer himself is a human being. Any one
who mistakes him for a boor makes a terrible blunder. Whenever it is in
his power to make his home more comfortable he does so with a degree of
earnestness that is almost terrible. He is anxious to save himself from
the possible imputation, by his own children, of being a less careful
provider than any one with whom his family are on intimate terms.
When there comes a year in which crops promise well, the farmer will buy
anything that his family may want, if he can pay by giving his note of
hand, to fall due after the yield of the year is sold. Makers of
sewing-machines, organs, pianos, venders of furniture and bric-a-brac,
agents of subscription-books, go first and most steadily to the farmers
with their wares. The farmer will give his note, the vender will find
some one who will discount it, and in the end it must be paid or
compromised. If the crops go well everything is paid--perhaps. If not,
the farmer is deeper than ever in the morass of debt. He has the
consolation, apparently slight, though it is great to him, that his
family has enjoyed some of the benefits of villagers whom they have
envied, and that some day, somehow, he will get even with the world for
it. Perhaps this apparent extravagance of his will keep his family
together longer than the family of his neighbor A or B or C, from which
the boys have drifted into village stores and shops, and the girls into
domestic service in the town, or perhaps into factories, all to avoid
the hard work, but still more, the loneliness and barrenness of the
average farmer’s home.
How helpless and unpromising is the present condition of the American
farmer can best be imagined by a glance at the farming interest as it
exists at present in the New England States. Here, within the lifetime
of the present generation, mills have dotted the sides of every river
and brook that has sufficient power to turn a wheel. Thousands of people
are gathered closely together every few miles along these water-courses,
working in mills and factories, and absolutely dependant upon the
surrounding country for their food supplies. Yet in no other section of
the country are there so many abandoned farms. A short time ago the
twelve best farms in the State of Vermont were practically abandoned
because it seemed impossible to their owners to work them without a
loss, and a bill was introduced in the Legislature to exempt these
particular farms--which, again I repeat, were the best in the State--to
exempt these farms from taxation so that some one might be persuaded to
work them. It is not that the farmers have no market for what they
produce, but that the finer farm products, or what in the larger cities
are called the products of market-gardening, are of a nature so
perishable that the profitable promise of a good soil may be speedily
lost by the loss of the field itself after gathering.
Even near the large city of New York, where some men pay the interest on
land worth five thousand dollars per acre for the sake of tilling it for
market-gardening purposes, there are thousands of acres of ground
utterly neglected year after year, as they have been for the past twenty
years. It is possible that some of these might have been tilled to
profit, but, with a steady demand for labor in the cities for which sure
and frequent pay is guaranteed, the farmer’s sons and daughters left
their home, and the father was left without assistance and without means
to hire help. Even had he hired it, the results would have been the
same--the balance on the wrong side at the end of the year.
Frequently the suggestion is made that the farmers should receive a
bounty from the Government or from his State on special products, and
this system, so far as individual States are concerned, is in partial
operation. The farmer himself is distinctly of the opinion that, while
legislation provides special relief and assistance for nearly every
other class in the industrial world, he should not be neglected. When he
begins to demand such assistance, as he is now quite willing to do,
there will be before the public a question of greater magnitude than any
labor problem which has yet appeared. Special legislation has an
unpopular sound, but the fact exists, as any follower of Congressional
and legislative proceedings well knows.
The granger movement in the West was the initial of this attempt at
improving the farmer’s condition. Like other great popular movements, it
began with a sudden impulse, in which there was more earnestness than
intelligence; yet any observer of the necessities of the farmer and the
management of the railways knows that there was a substantial basis of
sense to it. For a great many years the railways took the lion’s share
of the farm’s yield, on the plea that it cost that proportion of the
value of the crop to move corn or wheat or pork to market. Why it took
so large an amount is well known in the case of many roads, which by
watering their stock or subsidizing construction companies were
capitalized at several times their value. In the future efforts of the
farmer to secure recognition and proper compensation for his service,
the factors of the problem may not be so distinct, but, unless something
is done in the direction of legislative assistance, the farms of the
West must in time be deserted as largely as those of the eastern States,
in which there are now thousands of farms in which not only the land,
but the buildings, are without occupants, and are at the service of
anyone who may be fool enough to occupy them--that is the farmer’s way
of putting it.
It has frequently been suggested that the farmer could save largely from
the financial results of his year’s work by participating in
co-operative movements for the supply of stores and other necessities of
his family on his farm. It may not be known to theorists that this
suggestion has nothing new in it. It occurred to the farmer in hundreds
of counties, and he endeavored to act upon it. But what can a man do in
the way of purchasing from first hands, who has no capital with which to
purchase? Farmers’ stores and farmers’ clubs were tried, to a large
extent, forty or fifty years ago, all over the States which now are the
most populous section of the Mississippi valley. Sometimes the effort
resulted in the establishment of depots of supply for farmers alone, but
a single year of bad crops, whether caused by drought or insect pests or
overflows, or any other cause entirely outside of the control of the
farmer, would cause the ruin of any establishment which chanced to be
started with capital sufficient only for a little while.
As before stated, and as must be kept in mind in each and in all
considerations of the farmer’s lot and the farmer’s future, the
agriculturist of the United States is almost always a man without
capital, and a man whose constant struggle is to be equal by his output
to his daily demands. When a farmer’s store failed, the deficiency had
to be made up in cash, even if some of the backers had to sell their
estates. Bankruptcy proceedings or “arrangements” with creditors were
not easy. It is no exaggeration to say that it would be far easier, in
most parts of the United States, to sell a white elephant or a
million-dollar diamond than to turn a farm into cash at short notice,
although the seller were willing to submit to a ruinous sacrifice. There
are hundreds of thousands of farmers in the better and more fully
settled States, who for years have had their estates in the market, and
been willing and anxious to sell at a loss, yet have been utterly unable
to find a purchaser, except among men of their own class, who had no
money to pay in advance and who could simply offer a mortgage as
security for future payment, and from which mortgage, in case of default
on interest or principal, nothing could be obtained for a year or more,
and even then only after proceedings most uncomfortable to institute and
likely only to result in a terrible sacrifice to the creditor. The
number of men who are “land poor” in the agricultural districts of the
United States is almost beyond computation. The man who has a farm of
two or three hundred acres, nominally valued at a hundred dollars per
acre, is supposed to be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars and
quite good for all his debts. The truth is that often he suffers more
for lack of some small necessity for which cash must be paid than the
city mechanic or laborer, who receives only a few dollars per week for
his services.
Why doesn’t he borrow from a bank, giving a mortgage for security? Bless
you, no bank that would lend to farmers, on the risks and time usually
necessary, could continue in business.
The suggestion may be startling, but still it is practical, that it may
yet be necessary, for the proper feeding of the community, that farming,
like the policing of cities and the maintenance of an army and the
conduct of the postal department, shall be done at the expense of the
government. This seems to have been the method in Egypt in the days of
Pharaoh and of Joseph, his steward, and America may yet have to revert
to it. The Government will have either to manage the farms or assist the
farmers; the people may choose which shall be done.