The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-11-15
WILSON ASSAILS MIDDLE MEN FOR
 HIGH FOOD COST
President Tells Grangers That Bigger Crops Are
 Essential.

Wilson held the middlemen responsi- ble for the high cost of foodstuffs last night in a speech welcoming to Wash ington the convention of the National Grange, the first formal speech he has delivered since the election. Urging that farmers increase their output, the President said:
 We ought to raise such big crops that circumstances like the present can never occur, when men can make as if the supply was so short that the middleman could charge for 1t what he pleased. It will not do to be mig gardly with the rest of the world in respect to it's food supply"
 The President did not mention re- cent petitions to him to declare an embargo on the exportation of food stuffs from the United States, and he did not refer even indirectly to the outcome. of the presidential election. His address was interrupted frequent ly by applause from the farmers at tending the fftieth anniversary cele@ bration of the founding of the Grange.
 Problems of the Farmers.
 Is lows:
 Tt goes without saying that the physical life of the nation has always depended upon the farm. It goes without saying, also, that to large extent the physical life of the world has drawn it's sustenance from the great areas of farm land in the United States. We have sent food to all the countries of the world. But you know that as our own population has in- creased the proportion in. which we could help foreign countries as con- trasted with our own has decreased and there are problems that are com parable with the problems of states manship lying ahead of the farmers of the United States.
 I have been very much interested In conferring with the Secretary of Agriculture to find that although the laboratory and the investigations of the man of science who was not di- rectly concerned with the farm have had great deal to>do with the pro- motion of agriculture in the United States, as elsewhere, what has had still more to do with it has been the intelligent farming of the Individual farmer. Most of the methods which the demonstrators of the Department of Agriculture have been busy to spread as far and wide as possible have been methods which they have learned from the most accomplished and best instructed farmers in the United States.
 2 'In other words, the Department of Agriculture has had, as one of it's most important duties, to put all the farmers of the United States, so far as possible, where the best of the farmers of the United States had got of their own initiative and of their own intelligence. That, after all, is the: business of education anyhow-to spread the product of the best minds far and wide. so that they may be accessible to everybody.
 "But in the future we have got to bring more of the area of the United States under cultivation than is un2 der cultivation now. We have got to increase the product at every point where it is susceptible of being in- creased. We have got to study the variation of crops. We have got to study how to assist, nature, or at any rate understand nature, by making
 
 and varied soils. One of the things ample, is that what we have called the pine barrens of our southern coast need not be barrens at all; that if we add single additional chemical element we can make the sand bloss- om and bloom and produce crops, and that: if nature is only questioned close 1y enough she will yield us her rich est products for 'our own assistance and for the assistance in the rest of the world.
 we have got to look closely into these secrets, and we have got to realize that there must go forth from the United States the best agricultur- al intelligence of all the world We have got the means. We have got the purpose We have started along the right lines.
 Loans for the Farmer.
 ""One of the things that has most interested me about what has been done recently by legislation for the benefit of the farmer is the question why it was nohdon long before. It is astonishing that the assets-the
 
 assets-of the farm should not have been available as a basis of credit in the banks on the same terms as the assets of commercial undertaking and manufacturing industry ' Cattle are just as visible and tangible as goods in warehouses and goods on trains
 Credit based on cattle is as good as credit based on bills of lading, and the astonishing thing is not that 1t has been done now, but that it took SO long to do it. And when you add to that what has been done by the Rural Credits bill in the way of long extended credits you will see that we have. so to say, got ready for the first time to use the capital of this coun- try to push forward the agricultural industry of this country We have | liberated the credits of the banks and | we have modified, through the De- partment of Agriculture, the scientific of the world.
 With that combination, every na- tion in the world ought to come to us i to learn how to raise big crops