The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1913-06-11
THE CROP KILLERS
Secretary COburn Pays Them
His Compliments.
In an Address to Grain Men at
Wichita. Today.


before the millers and grain dealers OF
the Southwest country at the annual
meeting of the Wichita Board of Trade
| F. D. COburn. secretary of the board
of agriculture this afternoon paid his
respects to the Kansas crop killers and
declared they had done more to make
the state a cemetery OF buried hopes
than any one other element in Kansas
| Secretary Coburn told the millers and
grain dealers of the grasshopper,
drouth and bug scares of recent years.
These stories, he declared, are still
| green in the minds of thousands OF
! people, while the Kansas crop produc-
! lions are recalled on in the statistical
reports. Coburn took especial delight in
! f1aying the wild press reports and the
statements of crop experts and people
who gave self made interviews regard
| ing the calamities and crop shortages
1 in Kansas.
| In part Secretary Coburn said:
| 1T has been the misfortune of Kan
| sas from the beginning to have in her
| population a not large but always ac-
| tive element whose one means of pub
| licity and emergence from obscurity
was the invention and dissemination of
some tale of woe, describing what inn
Ponds or will happen next week where
by dire poverty will stare US in the face
and the state be in danger of depopula-
ton. Probably no other commonwealth
has ever been afflicted to the same ex-
tent with pests of this type, some of
them too, officially or otherwise on the
payroll of the people and the God
favored commonwealth they ScandaliZe.
Were is not for this Kansas would
today have twice the present number
of prosperous people, twice her num-
Der of improved farms and twice the
number of happy homes that are now
here. Had it not been thus thousands
of people who sought change, untold
millions of capital seeking investment
md nV16e of 70 NV
spectators to the Canadian Northwest,
the desolate, arid stretches of sand,
mesquite and cactus in Texas, the bar
renS and alligator aquariums of Flor
ida, and the mighty outpouring of
foreign emigration to the pampas of
Argentine would have been impelled
toward Kansas by sheer force of CRAWL
tation.
1T is not what the uniformed, our
enviouS competitors, or the experts
of speculative interests hired to deride
our prospects may say, that kills. but
the succession of calamity tales in one
form or another advertised by our own
people 1t is the idle gossip and CAB
Bile, the exaggerated statements of al
legged alarming discoveries and condi-
tions that put deadly blight on the
commonwealth. and make some region
remote seem preferable.
In the face of the prodigious crops
raised, marvels of the world, there has
matter how great, that btween seed
time and harvest was not the victim of
repeated assaults and attempts at as
sassination bv talking, writing, print
ing and telegra phing, exaggerated de-
clarations of defrred rainfall, hot
winds, frosts. hail, chinch bugs, green
bugs. hessian flies, army worms, grass
hoppers. San Jose scale. hog cholera,
electricity and welI-nigh whatsoever
else that suggests dearth, calamity and
fan limo n NO h9xv Tod
fronted throughout the present season.
taking the state as whole, with one of
the greatest if not the greatest wheat
harvests in our history the same sort of
campaign has been and is being waged
wheat being the particular target at
this time, as this is the wheat season
tending to fix Kansas in the public
mind as continuously the prey of crop
failure and a cemetery of buried hopes.
Is it not an evil bird that befouls its
own nest?
AN illustration of low the public is
misled and befogged by the roorbacks an |
nually sent broadcast was afforded by our
experience in 1907, with a single species of |
insect-the much-heralded green bug and |
the wheat crop, in practically the same |
territory that has had much damning |
notoriety within the past thirty days on |
account of weather conditions. GossipS and |
scandal mongers made the world believe |
that Kansas would be breadless, yet in |
spite of this when our wheat was garner |
ed it outweighed and outmeasured that of |
any other state IN all the land. That |
years green bug scare Is remembered |
around the world, but the story of our
having that year "a million bushels of
wheat, worth 81 million dollars, is re-
called only by statistics.
I'VE are constantly advertising the state
as a failure, yet the government reports
shown that in the twelve years ending
vii, 1911 Kansas raised more wheat by II
million bushels than any other state in
the Union. The wheat grown in Kansas
in the last twenty years amounted to
1 ,236, 9OS, SIS bushels, worth at the thresh- |
ing machine $S24 POI. 463; the corn raised in
the same years 1907. 4S7, sos bushels |
worth, $1.0S1. 67S,S17, and we raise nearly
twice the alfalfa grown in any other state |
Would it not be the part of wisdom to |
substantiated facts like these
"a Their than burden the wires and the
press with details of how grasshoppers
have appeared in a Ford county cemetery, |
or that failure to rain in Stevens county |
would mean a dry spell threatening hurt |
to the gooseberry crop?
kansas needs no booms. boomers nor
booming. No community or section ever
had boom that was not in the long run
What she needs is to be fair
with herself, having the truth told of her
advantages and attractions as a whole
and less advertising of temporary adverse
conditions that are in the main local and
by no means representative of the state
Volunteer purveyorS of peSSimism, profess |
sional discoveries and the Pullman night |
riding experts have cost the state of
Kansas more than all the noxious insects
weat Their misfortunes and animal diseases
with which she is likely to be afflicted in
the next fifty years.