Items from the Editorial Comment page of The Southern Planter, January 1941 issue
Land for Landless Farmers
Deserving tenants who are able to qualify for a loan under the Farm Security Administration’s Tenant Purchase Plan have the opportunity of a lifetime to own a family-sized farm. The last Congress appropriated $50,000,000 to provide promising tenant families with the necessary cash to buy farms. The loans are spread over a period of 40 years and bear 3 per cent interest. Other charges, including principal payments, are arranged to suit the farming system.
The 1040-41 allocation of funds by states for Region IV in which most of our subscribers reside is as follows:
Kentucky: $1,751,704
North Carolina: $2,766,491
Tennessee: $2,182,374
Virginia: $1,121,975
West Virginia: $523,399
Total: $8,345,943
Landless farmers who live in these states and are interested in obtaining one of these land purchase loans should call at the local FSA office. Your county agent can give you its exact location.
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An Appealing Cause
An article elsewhere in this issue calls attention to the annual infantile paralysis campaign in Virginia. This is part of a national effort sponsored by President Roosevelt and designated not only to ameliorate suffering and to rehabilitate suffers, but eventually, through laboratory research, to eliminate the disease as a dreadful factor in human distress and wastage.
Rural people especially should be interested in this war on infantile paralysis. Of approximately 12,000 crippled children in Virginia, something like 8,000 are in rural districts. For the fight against this disease, state funds are limited. Money obtained in these campaigns is used to supplement official effort, giving promise of quick and effectual aid to all sufferers. Early treatment of infantile paralysis prevents deformities in many cases. By the same token, it paves the way to economic rehabilitation of the victims.
Every county in our area is organized for this campaign. We hope our readers will cooperate in it to the fullest extent. Contributions, however small, will be welcome in the furtherance of an appealing cause.
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Sheep for North Carolina
Hon. W. Kerr Scott, Commissioner of Agriculture, is the greatest sheep booster we have come upon in North Carolina. He sees no reason why the state’s once great sheep industry cannot be brought back on a profitable plane, and he has proved it to his own satisfaction at his Melville Jersey Farm near Haw River in Alamance County.
“My father gave me 10 sheep when I was married 21 years ago and I have kept around 20 ewes ever since. Over a period of years,” Mr. Scott told us at the North Carolina State Fair last fall, “these sheep have pad about as well as any crop on the place. We sell a crop of lambs and a crop of wool every spring. Until recent years we collected enough cash form the sheep to pay our taxes.”
Mr. Scott’s only losses have been due to mishaps. He has solved the internal parasite problem by regular rotation of pastures. Sheep clean up much feed on the farm that otherwise would go to waste. He keeps grade Shropshire ewes and uses a Hampshire ram.
This is the experience of an agricultural leader and practical farmer in a state where the average farmer gets 85 cents of his income dollar from the sale of crops and 15 cents from the sale of livestock and livestock products. A better balance between crop farming and stock farming is the crying need of Carolina agriculture. Can’t something be done in 1941 to correct this lopsided condition of the state’s farming system?
North Carolina farmers who are interested in adding a new source of livestock income to the family till should take a tip from their Commissioner of Agriculture and consider sheep.
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System for Agricultural Finance Needed
The extent of our farmers’ need for a satisfactory method of financing long term loans at low interest rates is suggested in the table below. It shows the percentage of the farm mortgage debt held by the Federal land banks in the “top of the South” at the end of the last fiscal year.
Percentage of Farm Mortgage Debt Held by Federal Land Banks in the Upper South (June 30, 1940)
Delaware: 14.8 percent
Maryland: 25.5
North Carolina: 39.6
Virginia: 44.8
West Virginia: 44.9
South Carolina: 52.6
We cannot develop an ideal country life unless we establish a full and adequate system of agricultural finance, a system that extends treatment to the farmer equivalent to that which the business man now enjoys under the Federal Reserve System. To this and our farmers should demand the outright federal guarantee of farm loan bonds; they should crystalize sentiment in favor of such action by the government. Such guarantee is essential if we are to secure long term land loans at low rates of interest.
It is remarkable that those who represented agriculture in Congress at a time when it was found necessary to bring succor to great business failed the farmer. Indeed, many of them pride themselves with having withheld a federal guarantee for rural credit, which would have brought hope and happiness to our farmers.
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