The President Addresses the Farm Bureau, 1935

The Nation’s Agriculturist, January 1935

For a Common Justice by Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Do unto your neighbor as you would be done by.” That Golden Rule, the President of the United States told 20,000 Farm Bureau members attending the 17^th annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation, is the foundation for all justice. Millions heard President Roosevelt’s address over the radio. Here is part of it.

Three years ago in addressing the farmers of the nation, I reminded them that the economic life of the United States is a seamless web. This was a means of illustrating the great dependence of each economic unit in the nation upon every other unit. Farm prosperity cannot exist without city prosperity, and city prosperity cannot exist without farm prosperity.

Only a few generations ago, interdependence between agriculture and industry was not I any way as great as it is today; but now your welfare depends in part on what you in the country do and in large part on which people do in the cities as well.

Your own experience of three and four years ago doubtless brings all of this vividly to your minds. Your sufferings—those sufferings of rural America—were not because you were not producing, for your granaries and storehouses were bursting with the products of your labor, but because things in city and country had both got out of balance and purchasing power had declined to the point where people in the cities did not have the money to buy farm produce and people on the farms did not have the money to buy city products.

Two Major Factors

Two things were at that time especially clear. First, that because of almost unbelievably low prices for farm products, the growers of these products could not meet their indebtedness, could not pay their taxes, and could not meet the living expenses of their families. The other fact was that in most major crops a constantly accumulating surplus had reached such absurdly high levels that crop price levels could not possibly rise until something was done to cut down to a reasonable level the bulging surplus which overhung the market.

For these reasons the recovery program that this Administration proposed and that Congress enacted was a many-sided one. The Administration and the Congress that took office in March 1933 recognized that the emergency they faced then came from many causes and endangered the life of many groups. Consequently, it put the power of government behind not only railroads and banks, but the industrial workers of the nation, the farmers, the small home owners, the unemployed, and the young people hwo suffered from utter lack of opportunity. It was a great emergency and it required swift action. Mistakes were inevitable because it was a new field.

Just Common Sense

Justice and old-fashioned common sense demanded that in the building of purchasing power we had to start with agriculture. I knew enough of the problems of the men and women who were partners with te soil to realize the depth of their suffering and the extent of their need back there in 1932 and early 1933. I knew the pangs of fear and moments of rejoicing that come t the farmer as the harvest frowns or smiles. And I realize the almost equally crushing sense of futility that comes to a farmer when, after months of toiling from morning to night, he reaps a bumper crop, only to see the price fall so low that it scarcely pays him to take his crop to market.

One of the greatest curses of American life has been speculation. I do not refer to the obvious speculation in stocks and bonds and land booms. You and I know that it is not inherently a good thing for individuals in any nation to be able to make great fortunes by playing the market without the necessity of using much in the way either of toil or of brains; their tools are a little capital and a good deal of luck.

Evils of Speculation

The kind of speculation I am talking about is the involuntary speculation of the farmer when he puts his crops into the ground. How can it be healthy for a country to have the price of crops vary 350 and 500 and 700 per cent, all in less than a generation? If you invest your savings or your capital in whiat you consider a wholly safe investment, which will conserve your principal so that  you will still have that principal intact after 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, you are naturally aghast if the value of that investment drops 50 per cent. Equally, when you make the investment you do not expect the principal suddenly to increase 50 per cent in value.

And yet we have shrugged our shoulders when we have seen cotton run up and down the scale between 4 ½ cents and 28 cents, wheat run down and up the scale between $1.50 and 30 cents—corn, hogs, cattle, potatoes, rye, peaches—all of them fluctuating from month to month and from year to year in mad gyrations, which, of necessity, have left he growers of them speculators against their will.

Relief Measures

The measures to which we turned to stop the decline and rout of American agriculture originated in the aspirations of the farmers themselves expressed through the several farm organizations. I turned to these organizations and took their counsel and sought to help them to get these purposed embodied in the law of the land. What you wanted and what you and I have endeavored to achieve was to put an end to the destructive forces that were threatening American agriculture. We sought to stop the rule of tooth and claw that threw farmers into bankruptcy or turned them virtually into serfs, forced them to let their buildings, fences and machinery deteriorate, made them rob their soil of its God-given fertility, deprived their sons and daughters of a decent opportunity on the farm. To those days, I trust, the organized power of the nation has put an end forever.

I say “the organized power of the nation” advisedly, because you and I as Americans who still believe in our republican form of constitutional government know, as a simple fact, that 48 separate sovereign states, acting each one as a separate unit, never were able and never will be able to legislate or to administer individual laws adequately to balance the agricultural life of a nation so greatly dependent on nationally grown crops of many kinds.

As a first step organized agriculture pointed out that it was necessary to bring agriculture into a fair degree of equality with other parts of our economic life. For so long as agriculture remained a dead weight on economic life, sooner or later the entire structure would crash. We used for temporary guidance the idea of parity between farm prices and industrial prices. As you know, the figures that we used to determine the degree to which agricultural prices had fallen in relation to other prices were based upon the figures of 1909 and 1914. This was a fairly satisfactory way of measuring our efforts. Those five years preceding the beginning of the World War were years of fair prosperity in this country. They were the last years before the widespread disturbance caused by the World War took place in our economic life. And measured by the figures built upon this standard, the relative purchasing power of the farmer had fallen to less than 50 per cent of normal in early 1933. I promised to do what I could to remedy this, and without burdening you with unnecessary figures, let the record say that a relative purchasing power of below 50 per cent has now moved up today to better than 90 per cent. As I have pointed out before, this rise in farm prices has meant a very substantial improvement in the farm income of the United States. The best available figures show that it has increased nearly $3 billion in the past 2 ½ years.

Consumer Benefit

I think it is safe to say that although prices for farm products show many increases over depression lows, the farm program instead of burdening consumers as a group has actually given them net benefits. There are individuals whose incomes have not risen in proportion to the rise in certain food prices; but at the same time, the total net income of city dwellers is several billion dollars higher than 1932, and I think you will agree with me that bargain prices for food in 1932 were little consolation to people in cities with no income whatsoever.

Masses Fair-Minded

Though food prices in the cities are not on the average as high as they were, for example, in 1929, yet they are in many cases too high. It is difficult to explain why in many cases if the farmer gets an increase for his food crop over what he got three years ago, the consumer in the city has to pay two and three and four times the amount of that increase. Lifting prices on the farm up to the level where the farmer and his family can live is opposed chiefly by the few who profited heavily from the depression. It is they and their henchmen who are doing their best to foment city people against the farmers and the farm program. It is that type of political profiteer who seeks to discredit the vote in favor of a continued corn-hog program by comparing our desire for a fair price for the farmer to the appetite of hogs for corn.

Yet I know that the great masses of city people are fair-minded. They, like yourselves, suffered deeply from the depression, and I believe with all my heart that millions of these city people, struggling back towards better days, resent the attempts of political advantage seekers and profiteers to heap ridicule upon the recovery efforts that all of us are making.

But the success that has attended and is attending our efforts to stem te depression and set the tide running the other way cannot blind us to the necessity of looking ahead to the permanent measures which are necessary to a more stable, economic life. We are regaining a more fair balance among the groups that constitute the nation and we must look to the factors that will make that balance stable.

Where Is Justice?

The thing we all are seeking is justice in the common-sense interpretation that means “Do unto your neighbor as you would be done by.” That interpretation means justice against exploitation on the part of those who do not care much for the lives, the happiness and the prosperity of their neighbors. The nation applauds the efforts of its agencies of government to deal swiftly with kidnappers, gangsters, and racketeers: That is justice. The nation applauds the efforts of its agencies of government to save the innocent victim from wildcat banking, from watered stocks, and form all other kinds of “confidence games”: That is justice. The nation applauds the efforts of government to obtain and to maintain fair rewards for labor, whether it be the labor of the farmer or the labor of the factory worker or the labor of the white-collar man: That is justice. The nation applauds efforts, through the agencies of government, to give a greater social security to the aged and to the unemployed, to improve health, and to create better opportunities for our young people: That, too, is justice.

In this quest for justice we have made progress. It is a lasting progress because the people of the nation have learned more about effective co-operation in the past 2 ½ years  than in the previous 25 years.  We understand more than ever before what that term “the seamless web” means. We seek to balance agriculture and we have made great strides. But in balancing agriculture we know that it must be in balance not alone with itself but with industry and business as well—that the producing public must give consideration to the consuming public.

America Points Way

Year by year as we go on, many details, many problems will need to be analyzed and solved. Agriculture and industry and business are in overwhelming majorities co-operating for a common justice as never before. In these present days we have seen and are seeing, not a rebirth of material prosperity alone: of greater significance to our national future is that spiritual reawakening, that deeper understanding that has come to our land. We who strive to dispel the bitterness and the littleness of the few who still think and talk in terms of the old and utter selfishness, we are working together towards the destruction of sectionalism, of class antagonism and of malice. We who strive for co-operation among all parts of our great population in every part of the nation, we intend to win through to a better day. We strive for America, and if we shall succeed, as by God’s help we will, America will point the way towards a better world.

Diversify to Feed Your Family, 1916

“Diversity and Live at Home” by A.L. French, Rockingham County, N.C., published in The Southern Planter, January 1916

I have been going about a little more than usual since late summer, among the farmers and businessmen in several states, and have listened to see what I could hear that I might pass along with benefit to my fellow farmers.

I have found contented “well-to-do” farmers in a community and in the same community found those who were hard up, whose families were lacking a great many of the necessities of life.

There is always a cause for every effect, so my search was for the causes in these cases, and they were many but the two that “stuck out” were buying a living and working poor land. I have talked so much to Planter readers about the poor land problem, of what a drag it is on the farmer, that I shall say nothing of it at this time except just this: that it is our greatest problem and we want to be thinking about it all the time.

This time, however, at the beginning of another good year, I want to have a word with the man who is in the habit of bringing home with him something for his family or stock to eat every time he goes to town. I was out in the great middle South last month, taking part in the big farm improvement campaign carried on in the territory tributary to Memphis, Tenn., by the Business Men’s Club of Memphis and the business men of the local towns, supplemented by the fine work of the Farm Extension Division of the International Harvester Company of Chicago.

Before one of the teams of 22 men and women struck a county, our advance man had been there and ascertained by investigation at the freight houses, just what the people of that county spent the previous year for food supplies for man and beast. It was a curious fact that in almost every instance, the amount so expended was just about equaled to the amount of the cotton sales for the same period. And the money was, of course, if we are raising a money crop to buy supplies, why not cut down the acreage of cotton somewhat, raise the food supplies and thus cut out some of the “wear and tear?” This, of course, if the food supplies can be as easily grown in our territory as in other sections—a question we Southern folks will answer in the affirmative every time, of course; for we all know what our soil, when properly handled, will produce all sorts of food products in greater abundance than will soils in colder sections, and of quality unequaled elsewhere.

Of course, we would not want to cut out the cotton crop or other money crop entirely, but it has been demonstrated many times that the same number of pounds of cotton may be much more economically produced on one acre than on two acres of land.

So cutting somewhat the acreage of cotton does not necessarily mean the reduction of the number of bales. The fact is, in boll weevil sections, the reduction of acreage and better handling of the crop means more pounds of cotton per given acre instead of less.

So there is no economic rule we will be compelled to violate and no climatic conditions to overcome if we start in this month with the determination to produce, on our own farm, all the meat we are to use this year, all the eggs our idle rich are to consume, all the garden peas, Irish potatoes, beans of ever sort, cabbage, peppers, sweet potatoes, roasting ears, lettuce, salsify, parsnips, spinach, turnips, carrots, beets, and you know all the others without me mentioning them, that should be produced for home consumption and sale.

This means fairly good hogs, decently kept on corn, grass and clover, with a clean house to sleep in. It means we must weed out the four and five-year-old hens and hatch plenty of pullets to take their place, out of eggs from the best layers of the flock. And it may mean battening the cracks on the west, north and east sides of the old hen house and the cleaning and spraying of the houses at more regular and frequent intervals. It means that we must abandon the old square garden patch and plow a good long piece of well-drained land very deep at the first opportunity when the land is in proper condition; fertilize this land well and lay off our garden on this good deep soil in long rows, so cultivation may be done with the horse at a minimum of expense. “Then the planting must be done on time, and often, so abundance from the garden will be the rule.

Then it may mean the planting of more than the usual acreage of peas and soja [soybean?] beans for hay and hog feed and, of course, it must mean better handling of an increased acreage of corn. And it might mean the cutting and curing while green and tender of a large amount of broom straw and Johnson grass for hay, in case other hay should be short. I would far rather feed early cut broom straw to horses next winter at a cost of two or three dollars per ton, than to feed the hay that the other fellows had piled up the cost on until the price is so high that only the very rich can afford to feed it. Understand that I am not advocating the use of broom straw hay except as a makeshift until we get caught up on better quality hay; however, I believe I have seen enough broom straw within the past month to have fed all the cattle in the South in better shape than the majority of them are being fed, had it been cut when green and succulent, and well cured.

Animal food and human food is costing our South country a large proportion of the money that our tobacco and cotton crops are bringing, and by a little readjustment of our farming practice and more economical handling of the work on the farm, we could grow every dollar’s worth of it with our present supply of labor and not reduce the cotton or tobacco crop by one pound.

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The Southern Planter: Devoted to Practical and Progressive Agriculture, Horticulture, Trucking, Live Stock and Fireside

Helping Farmers Buy Land, Preventing Polio, Sheep for N.C., Asking Government to Help Farmers the Way It Helps Businesses, 1941

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.

The Wonders of Getting Electricity

A letter to the editor from January 1937 issue of The Southern Planter magazine

As the saying goes, ‘10 years were added to my life,’ and in only three weeks. The explanation: Just recently the power line came through our community. We were proud we could afford lights and iron. Then I started boarding a teacher who brought her own radio with her and gave the family the privilege of playing it when we cared to, and this is what added 10 years. I’ve always loved dancing and music and now to turn on the radio takes me back to younger days when they meant everything to me, and it even seems to lighten my work.

--Mrs. E.G. Lane, Greenfield, Virginia

Watauga's New Cheese Factory, 1937

From the Jan. 1937 issue of The Southern Planter

The construction of a cheese factory in Watauga County, North Carolina has opened a new market for dairy products in that area.

The factory, which started operating recently, is located at Beaver Dam and is under the management of Bud Trivett, former cheese maker at the Beaver Dam Cooperative Factory.

Trivett has a fine herd of Holsteins which is supplying part of the milk used in making the cheese. He is also buying milk from other farmers of the section.

A unique feature of this new plant is the method of cooling the curing room by piping water from a cold mountain stream directly into the plant. Evaporation of the water maintains a temperature just right for curing cheese.

F.R. Farnham, North Carolina State College, says that Trivett is manufacturing a five-pound cheddar brick cheese which is finding a ready sale. The cheese is of excellent quality and is made into a convenient size desired by homemaker. 

Union and Montgomery County Farm Report, January 1949

By F.H. Jeter, Extension Editor, N.C. State College, Raleigh, as published in the Charlotte Observer on Jan. 10, 1949

UNION COUNTY

Tom Evans, manager of a Union County farm, is not yet ready to stop growing cotton. He believes it is still a good sandy land crop, because he picked 400 pounds of lint an acre at his first picking last fall and went on to average over a bale of lint per acre for the entire farm.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY

Over in adjoining Montgomery County, local corn growers have made an especial effort to produce their own planting seed for 1949. There were eight accredited producers with an average of 27.5 acres each, and they produced about 35 bushels an acre of No. 1 corn seed per acre. The growers say that this will be enough homegrown seed to plant 5,000 acres, which means that about 75 percent of the corn land can be planted with this locally grown seed supply. The regular yields of corn were lower than usual last summer although some of the growers in the Montgomery corn contest report from 92 up to 111 bushels an acre. Quite a few men have had corn to sell, but the price dropped to $1 a bushel locally. Let’s hope that these men will find some livestock with which to feed this surplus.

Ninety-one Montgomery boys entered the corn growing contest sponsored by the civic organizations of the county with probably the highest yield being that by Henry Allen of Troy, who produced 130 bushels on a measured acre.

County Agent Austin Garris says that the folks of Montgomery have gone right ahead with their farm fish ponds during the past summer and fall. Among the new builders have been D.W. Hamilton of Troy, Bill Tomlinson of Candor, and Lloyd Wood and Luke Saunders, both of Troy. Jesse Maness of Allreds had his old pond reworked and a new one added. 

In August, 20 fish pond owners secured bream from the hatchery near Hoffman. The ponds ranked in size from one-half acre to 10 acres and were stocked with 1,000 bream and 100 bass per acre. About 30,000 bream fingerlings were placed in 30 acres of pond in August.

R.H. Wesson, assistant agent, added that there are about 60 farm fish ponds in Montgomery at this time with 35 of them having been built and stocked this past year. Most of the ponds were built by the county terracing unit with the Brown Creek Soil Conservation District helping to secure the fingerlings. Ordinarily, Montgomery farmers plant their ponds for a spot that is unsuitable for growing crops, and they use the water so impounded for the livestock, swimming, irrigation, and as a spray water for treating the orchards and crops. Better still, the owners also like to fish, and they say that these farm fish ponds provide wonderful sport for an idle hour.

The county terracing unit also is used to clear land as well as to build dams and construct terraces. Robert Freeman of Troy had four acres of good land cleared in the early fall for planting to pasture. While he had the unit out there, he terraced eight acres and then had his lawn smoothed off, the rocks pushed out, and a new plantation road built. No use to have these heavy power units available and not use them, he says.

Mr. Garris believes that one of the finest things happening in Montgomery this past season has been the many new silos established and filled; the fine quality of hay saved; the new alfalfa fields seeded; and the small grain and pasture crops planted last fall. Practically every grade “A” dairyman in the county put up at least three tons of silage per cow as winter feed. This means plenty of succulent feed for any bad weather that may come along in January and February.

Where Farm Family's Money Went, 1939

From an editorial in the January 1939 issue of The Southern Planter

Where Your Money Goes

Did it ever dawn on you that 37 cents out of every dollar used for family living on the average farm goes for food? That is what Maryland home demonstration club women, who keep accurate records, have found—see Miss Hinton’s article on Miss Hunter’s page this month. Every housewife should study that article carefully because, we believe, better management of family finance will do much to make a little money go a long way.

For example, look at the item of food--$448.89 was the value of all food used, $244.89 was bought and $204.25 worth produced on the farm as chickens and eggs, dairy products, vegetables, etc. Stated differently, of every dollar used for family living, 37 cents went for food—20 cents for foods bought and 17 cents for homegrown foodstuffs. 

Food is the greatest item of cost in farm living, and here is the remarkable thing about Miss Hinton’s study: Some families bought nearly all of their food, while others produced up to 74 percent. Where as much as 55 percent of the food was raised at home, meals averaged 4 cents per person; where only 3 percent of the food was homegrown, meals averaged 28 cents each. Those who raised most of their food had better meals than those who lived out of the grocery store. Money saved on meals is released for the purchase of other commodities that make for better living on the farm—radios, home furnishings, water systems and better medical care. These facts give the live-at-home program a new meaning for 1939.

To the ladies:

1.       Get your husband to read Miss Hinton’s article.

2.       Have him buy you 300 baby chicks, use and sell the cockerels for broilers in late spring and keep the best pullets for fall and winter eggs.

3.       Get him to use as much commercial fertilizer on your garden as he puts under an equal area of cotton, tobacco, or potatoes; and insist that the garden by worked equally well.

4.       Then, keep at least two good milk cows—one to freshen in fall to produce milk in winter, and the other, to calve in spring for summer milk production.

If you will do these things, your family will live better in 1939, enjoy better health and have more money for family living, even if your income remains the same.