The Glenwood post., 1911-09-30
NOT FARMERS
BUT SOIL ROBBERS
President Of National Conselv. !.
alton Congress Attacks
Soil Culture Methods
BACK TO FARM IS PLEA

| Kansas City, Sept. 25.-Plain words
were used by the speakers at the open
ing session of the third annual nation
al conservation congress here today in
pointing out that continuation of
present day farming methods will re-
suit calamitously for the country. Not
| only a change in treatment of social
but of country people as well was
, urged. Only by bettering the social
conditions on the farm is was declared
could the young people be kept there.
About $500 delegates attended the
opening session. President Wallace OF
the congress said, in part:
cit will be my object in this address
not to discuss any phase of the con
servation movement exhaustively, but
to outline briefly two drifts of popula-
ton. The drift from the farm to the
city, and the drift from the city toward
the land and the work of this congress
as related thereto.
"Even before the daily press had
begun the crusade back to the land
| the movement toward the iand had
already begun.
| "The land hunger is not peculiar 70
any class of people nor to any state.
| The merchant, the banker, the railroat
official of New York and Boston, each
longs for a farm, possibly only as
summer home, but is willing to pay for
it in investment, in improvements and
cost Of management, more than it Is
worth in dollars or ever will be. He,
too, is bitten with land hunger. Many
small business men of our cities, VINO
cannot hope to secure a farm and live
on it, invest greedily in acreage in the
suburbs. The workman in the factory
aims to secure two or three acres on
which he can build himself home.
"Latent in the heart T. nearly every
man, be he man of business, clerk or
other employe, or aporing with his
hands, there is yearning desire to
have a piece of land to call his own.
"Alongside of this movement back
toward if not always to the farm, the
counter movement from the farm to the
town, which has been going on for
| fifty years, continues with increasing
and accelerated force. Farmers all over
the older west move in great numbers
or retire to the country towns; and
notwithstanding all this constant influx
of population from the farms these
towns, as the late census reveals, have
barely held their own and often have
lost in population the natural increase
of the towns themselves pouring into
the larger towns and cities, in which
the majority live with less comfort than
the farmers who remain on the farms.
Vast numbers of boys and girls fall a
prey to alluring vices of the city, and
many of them eventually take their
places with the down and out. Com
paratively few succeed and become
well-to-do.
''Our great problem, as 1 said to
this congress year ago, is how to pro-
duce food for our own people at prices
which they can afford to pay. But
how? Partly by putting more brains
INTO our farming. Many farmers have
more faith in moon signs than in agri-
cultural colleges and experiment sta
tions; more faith in ordinary politi-
clans than in college professors and
scientists; more faith in yellow journals
than in the best agricultural papers.
1.-The farmer complains that he can
not employ the labor necessary to grow
full crops on his land. There is just
ground for this complaint. The fac
tory, the store, the railroad, the trolley
line outbid him for the labor, even That
which is farm born and farm bred.
our modern farm problem is how to re-
tain on the farm all the boys and girls
born there, who are fit to be farmers
or farmers wives. This can be done
only in making farm life worth living.
CAN over the country there is the
beginning of a great social and indus
trial awakening. The farmer is begin
ming to magnify his Office to Gu:
loose from partisan bias, to do his own
thinking and act for himself. He is
paying better salaries to his school
teachers and insisting that the teach
ing have some relation to the life on