Clinch Valley news. [volume] (Jeffersonville, Va.) 18??-2019, 1915-12-17
WHAT ROADS MEAN TO FARM
ERS.


Before the war in Europe affected
the rates at sea, it cost the American
farmer more to haul bushel of
wheat nine and one-half miles to the
railroad station for shipment than it
cost the buyer to ship the same bush
ell of wheat from New York to Liy-
erpool, q distance of 5000 miles. The
average cost of hauling ton of farm
produce, or ton of anything else,
over the average country road is about
70 cents mile. Seventy years ago
the cost of the same service was IL
cents The cost of hauling over the
railroads is less now than one-ninth
as much as it was sixty wears ago.
The cost of hauling by railroad has
almost reached the vanishing point.
The cost of hauling over the country
roads has gone up.
BY careful calculation, Logan Wal
Ter Page, director of the United States
Office CT Public Roads, has reached
he conclusion that, with wise and
.Tuitable road laws and good bust
ness management, it would be entire
y practicable for the people to save
themselves on the two items of haul
.ng and administration the enormous
sum of $3.50, 900, 900 yearly. The rail-
roads In the United States carry about
9OO,OO0,000 tons of freight annually,
and of this vast tonnage at least 300,
0OO,OUO tons are hauled over the coun-
ny roads to the railroad station or to
the canals for shipment. The i'm
mense volume of mining products, ag-
grerating millions of tons, is not in
Guided In this estimate, but only the
agricultural, forest and miscellaneous
products hauled by wagon over the
public raods; nor in the cost of haul
ing back and forth between the farms
and the mills. 1t is an under estimate
rather than an overestimate to
place the cost of hauling over the
country roads at not less than $780,
UOO,O0O yearly, and no other business
but the business of farming could
stand such n strain without bank
ruptcy.
The main cause of agricultural dis
tress, a subject of perennial alarm to
popular favorites," is not so much
The wages of the workers or the in
fertility of the soil or the prices of
the products, but the enormous drain
of getting the stuff to the market, the
waste of the roads in the wear and
tear of machinery, the sacrifice of the
teams, the inefficiency of service COM
PEELED by impossible highways. Trib-
utary to every market town or rail
road station there are what Mr.. Page
calls Zones of production" From the
first of these zones all products can
be delivered to market at profit,
and from the rest one class of prod
ucts after another must be eliminated,
because of the prohibitive cost of
hauling; and beyond lie vast terrtor-
es that cannot be cultivated with
out the building and constant mainte-
nance of roads suited to whatever
traffic there may be developed. 1t has
been demonstrated that as the roads
from the market towns have been
improved, there has been great in
crease of their business, and Il CORE
spending improvement in the condi-
ton and opportunities of the rural
population, larger prosperity of the
individual farmer, greater traffic for
the railroads, better supplies and low
er prices for the consumer. 1t does
not pay to raise crops that cannot
be marketed readily and cheaply.
Millions of dollars worth of field and
orchard crops have been utterly vast
ed because of expensive and made
quate facilities for marketing. This
is one of the hard problems with
which the United States Department
of Agriculture is trying to deal
through the greatest experts in the
land, and they have found that the
building of good roads is essential
to the success of. the plan.