Dairying and Land Values Discussed. . . Comparison shows Big Advantage Where Cows Prevail. . . Old Farm Is New. . . After a Few Years of habitation by the Dairy Flock. . . Dairying and Farm Lands
By G.A. Cardwell
Agricultural and Industrial Agent, Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Co.
“And I’ll never again worry when I want a loan,
For I know very well if all other means fail
My cows, if well fed, will fill up the pail
With what paid off the mortgage today.”
--E.G. Bennett
This, the ninth article of the “Prosperity Follows the Dairy Cow” series is the experience of Hugh G. Van Belt. The article is one of the 1923 series for bankers and business men, used by the Belle Meade Butter company to encourage dairy development.
A dozen years ago I spent Sunday with my friend, F.B. Keeney in a valley in New York state.
That afternoon he drove me through the valley. On each side of the road were fertile farms, good houses, large barns, silos, luxuriant crops of corn, oats, clover and alfalfa. In every pasture good cows crazed.
I had heard of the worn out, abandoned farms of the east and I believed my friend was showing me a favored section.
I asked him to show me some of the abandoned farms. His reply was, “We have no abandoned farms—we did have, but learned our lesson.”
“For many years we have been importing bran from the northwest, corn and oats from the middle west and cotton seed meal from the south. These we have been feeding to good cows and returning the fertility from them to our soils. The next worn out farms you will see will be in the middle west, the northwest and the south. Three hundred years were required to wear out our lands. We did it with oxen. It is now being done with four-horse teams.”
That was before the day of the tractor which thoughtless men exhaust soils twice as fast as they could with four-horse teams and immeasurably faster than they did with oxen.
Where are we headed for today?
Localities in all of the sections referred to by my friend Keeney, bear evidence that he knew whereof he spoke.
Returning from New York I met a financial man from Waterloo, Ia. [Indiana] he was returning from New York city where he had been to market farm mortgages. He explained to me that he had personally taken these mortgages to New York, believing that the sum of money desired in return from them was exceptionally large. He had been surprised to find that they were eagerly purchased. He asked the big eastern bankers why then felt so favorably toward these mortgages. The answer was, that the vicinity surrounding Waterloo had become a dairy section of considerable prominence, that it is well known that the producing value of lands in a dairy section does not decrease, but increases, that dairying insures permanency of agriculture; that where soil fertility is being maintained and increased, where the producing value of land is increased, there, not only land selling values, but especially and loan values become enlarged. He was also told that as a result of this dairy development the land loan values within a radius of 100 miles of Waterloo, had increased on the records of Wall Street $50 per acre.
The big eastern banker realizes the importance of the cow to the community. He is willing to back up his judgment of the cow with his money. He doesn’t guess—he knows. Of how much greater importance is it to you—a leader in your community—to not only know the relationship of the cow to land values, but to take some active steps to ensure this cow occupying a more important position in the agriculture of your community. You must be the leader in this dairy development.
I was not so greatly impressed with this story until recently I told it to a banker in South Dakota. Immediately he grasped the vision of what a cow really means. In the parlance of the banker he said, “Those figures would mean $1 million added wealth to this community.”
These two illustrations merely suffice to prove that where there is dairying land, values increase, and where land values increase, the only form of agriculture that can be made profitable is dairying.
One crop farms exhaust the soil and results in poverty—diversified farming built around the keeping of good cows, conserves and increases soil fertility. It is a permanent system of agriculture and brings prosperity.
From the front page of The Enterprise, Williamston, N.C., Saturday, Sept. 29, 1923
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