The sea coast echo., 1913-11-29
SMALL PART OF THE PROFIT
Real Cleaners Of Boasted Agricultural
Wealth of Country Are Men
Who Manipulate Markets.

IL the uplifters were half as active
in searching for the ways and means
to enable the farmer TO sell his crops
to advantage as they are in deyising
schemes to lend him money, which
after all he must repay, the man be-
hind the pIow would not long need to
be borrower That there is great
profit IN farm products nobody now
questions; but 1t does not need a
statistical expert to prove that the
farmer gets only the smallest part OF
this profit, writes Wilmer Atkinson in
the Denver Field and Farm. The
members OF the milk combine amass
great wealth. while the owners OF the
cows are barely able to pay their feed
bills The makers of milk products
are also men of much substance; but
scrape enough together to give him.
self brief holiday The butter trust
is an assured fact and there is no
doubt about the financial rating OF
the members thereof; but the average
farmer is still obliged to give 90
day note for the cow he needs in or
der to keep the stream of golden but
ter undiminished.
OF the beef trust 1t seems almost SUI
perfiuous to write. The gentlemen
who form this trust which utilizes
every part of the steer from the horns
to the tail, and every part of the hog.
from the sequeal to the curl in its eau
IaI 40 nof Si7ffarinO the
pangs and pains of poverty; though
the man who fed the steers and the
hogs may scarcely have where to lay
his head or know how to rid himself
of the mortgage that weighs him
down.
When we come to consider the
crops which the farmer plants In
faith from year to year, and garners
by the sweat of his face, we find con-
ditions similar to those affecting other
productions of the farm. 1t is not the
man who sows and reaps the wheat
and corn or laboriously tends his po-
tato field, to the END that the bugs and
beetles do not eat him out of house
and home that wakes rich and AFRO
CANT. On the contrary, the real CLEAN
ers of the boasted agricultural wealth
of the county are the men who man1p-
ulate the markets and have strangle
hold on the grain elevators. They own
limousines and go to Europe in the
summer and to Florida or California
in the winter Few Of these soft
handed disseminators could raise
potato or a head of wheat If their
lives depended on it; but they are
master artists at depressing the mar
ket when the crops are in the hands
of the men who grew them and boom
ing prices when they have these
same crops secure in elevators and
storage warehouses.
Therefore, what the farmer needs to
enable him to better his condition is
not so much an easy means for bor-
rowing money-although this is
good enough reform in it's way-as re-
lease from the trusts and combines
that prey upon him and rob him of
what is justly his, because the laws do
not adequately protect his interests.
have already shown that there are
large profits made from all the pro-
ductions of the farm and that the
pursuit of agriculture is attended
with much gain, but that much of it
goes into the wrong pockets, and the
burning question of the day is how to
secure an equable division SO that the
producer shall get more and the mere
manipulation much less. To solve this
riddle of the ages is task worthy OF
the best minds of the twentieth GEN.
tury. The solution might not bring
about the millennium, but it would
give Justice to a great body of people
and make agriculture what in the be
ginning it was designed to be, an hon
orable, well-compensated calling.