Our farmers are getting around 12 cents for cotton these days. Or so the prices are quoted in the market reports, but as a matter of fact they are getting a good deal less than that in remote country places. We happen to know of one shipment of low grade cotton at $36 a bale.
And why? Because nobody want it at any price, the buyers say. The carry-over is excessive, the mills on this side are overstocked, and the demand overseas has ceased. Such are the current reasons handed out to our cotton farmers since the slump in cotton prices late last August.
Now the fact is, export demands for raw cotton were hardly less in 1920 than in 1919. The shipments abroad for the year ending last December were barely 400,000 bales less than the year before. See the Jan. 27 report of the Federal Department of Commerce.
There is economic chaos abroad, but it is dead certain that our exporters are shipping no raw cotton except for gold or on gilt-edge security.
And while they were shipping a little less they were getting a good deal more for it—an average of 36 cents a pound in 1920 against 33 cents in 1919!
There you are. Exporters getting 36 cents a pound from foreign consumers and paying domestic producers 12 cents or less!
If cotton and tobacco farmers cannot or will not bunch up in business-like ways to protect the prices they fairly ought to have, they are wooden-headed beyond words.
But will they?
The farmers in one Carolina county have recently surrendered more than a half million dollars to blue-sky artists selling worthless oil stock, fertilizer factory stock and the like; or so a local banker reported last week.
If they would only invest a half million dollars in public education, cooperative enterprise, and common sense, the county would lead the state in a jiffy in progress and prosperity.
From the front page of the University of North Carolina News Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., March 30, 1921
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