Arizona republican., 1908-02-16
Attention. farmersl

l This is to you exclusively, though the
 rest of the world may look on and see
 the fun if it wants to, and the whole
 country will profit by the result of
 your efforts. And the farmer will
 profit by having a better understand ing himself, of just what he is doing. This is to inspire the farmer to better
 efforts and to make better efforts an object to him.
 What can a farmer do in the Salt i River Valley? That is after he has ! farmed for a crop year ,what has he got left after paying his bills to show for his work and for interest on his ] investment? Has he got more than he could have got in Indiana, Illinois,.
 Iowa or Wisconsin? One man says.
 ''I worked so acres and cut 45O tons alfalfa hay;" another says "I got 25O tons alfalfa and fattened 40 head of cattle;" another put so many acres in strawberries and picked so many boxes.
 This is all interesting information and strangers coming into this com Imunity with a view of investing their money and settling down here. are glad to hear it, but it has occurred to The
 Republican that il would simplify
 matters to realize what can be done here if these and other examples could be compared and in order to compare them it would be necessary to aeduce
 all the examples to the same basis.
 You cannot compare strawberries with alfalfa nor alfalfa with beef; it doesn't mean anything. They are not alike.
 In order to arrive at an intelligent conclusion. the information seeker
 must ask the cattleman how many pounds of beef he sold and at what
 price and how much his expenses
 were. He must ask the hay man what
 price he got for his beef and what his expenses were. In that way he final
 ly digs out the information that the
 hay man has left for his profit say,
 (these are estimates only) s35 an acre and the beef man say, $45 an acre, and
 the strawberry man say s55 an acre, all after paying expenses. Now he in
 quires of each, how much he paid for his land and Assuming it to be S1O0 an acre in each case. MT Stranger figures a little further and he finds that roughly speaking, one man has a 9 per cent investment, one a 22 1-2 per cent lIiN tSltlltIl anu OIlt q - l-- per cent investment, and he says to him. self that compares favorably with what can be done in Ohio and this cli- mate seems to be just about what we have been looking for, and there seem to be a good many school houses and good roads and churches and stores and mail service and I guess I'll look into the thing further"
 How much easier it could be made for that man who comes here with his eyes and ears open and in effect says show me-" if We had our re- suits reduced to a common basis, a basis all can understand, the basis of our medium of exchange, money. And not only to dollars and cents. because S25 an acre net profit on land that cost $200 is not as good a result as S25 an acre net profit from land that cost $100 an acre. And so in the final analysis of results the amount of the l investment should be considered. Therefore, one common basis of com parison should be percentage of net profit to investment. If a man has S10O invested and gets a net profit of S1O he has a 10 per cent investment
 
 Somebody says that would be nice all right. but how are you going to get this information and figure it all out and reduce it to the desired basis? Read on. The Republican. ever on the alert to secure for it's readers and the people of the valley in general. that will help to promote the general welfare, has given this subject some serious thought. Some of the results of it's thinking have all ready been published in the shape of with ranchers. giving the results of their labors, as witness inter views several months ago with Flu gene Brady O'Neill, with Strawberry" Black and with "Onion" Thompson and dozens of others from time to time.
 It now proposes to carry the thing further and secure accounts of results reduced to the common basis of per centage of net profit to amount invest ed, and to publish these accounts. How to secure this information in the proper shape is what has bothered, but The Republican feels so sure that this is the best way to show up the intrin sic value of the land and the desira- bility of investing, that search was consistently continued to find the right method and here it is:
 This might truthfully be called the age of contests. Newspapers have contests, a popular maga- zine conducts an advertising contest, and typewriters have speed contests. In fact there are con tests of all kinds, but it has remained for The Republican to inaugurate a contest that is worth while that is, a farmers contest, with the object of l inducing the farmers of the valley to keep track of their expenses and their receipts from farm products for one year and make the results known to this paper. They will then be tabu- lated and published and probably put in pamphlet form to serve as a handy book of reference for strangers seek ing information about agricultural Op- portunities in this community.
 No contest is worth taking any in- terest in unless there be prizes for the winners. Realizing this. The Re publican has arranged to award to the winner of the Valley Farmers contest a handsome silver water set, with the name of the winner and the nature of the contest inscribed hereon, the set being valued at s25.
 For a second prize a fine silver cof-