Norwich bulletin., 1916-01-22

! CWrftten Specially for The Bulletin.o
 while think I have said some ten or dozen times that the farmer to be enlinently successful, needs to know more things and be able to do more things than any other man on earth, there are three main stems to his effort.
 He must be able to produce crops
 He must be able to sell his crops at a profit.
 He must be able to buy the materials for making crops so he can get pro- fit from them.
 The ordinary nanufacturer makes goods, cloth, wire, boots. refined su- clothes pins, etc,-to get profit from making them. He usually manufac- lures just one sort of ware. He knows, in at least general way, what his raw materials will cost him. what his labor will cost him, what price he can get for his product, and whether 1t will pay his overhead expenre es', and leave something for profit.
 Take the man who makes door hinges, for illustration. He uses iron for his material. Neither weather nor season affect the production of iron It comes out of the mines and flows from the smelting furnaces, about so many tons a. day, wet or dry, winter or summer. While the price varies somewhat its fluctuations are usually within very narrow limits. It would be safe to say that the changes in the price of raw iron, in an ordinary year and at ordinary markets, would not make difference of a cent dozen in the cost of ordinary butts. He can also reckon fairly close upon the cost ce his labor. Knowing the cost of iron ard tho rates of labor and the selling sseics Of hinges, he can tell. before he sets a tool at work, what his profit may reasonably be expected to be-. Then. subject oIily to the chances and accidents inuring to all business, he goes ahead and makes it. If be finds, by beforehand calculations, Aat he can't reasonably expect to make any profit off door hinges, then he stops making them.
 But how about the farmer? His raw material isn't like iron. It con- sists of dirt, the constituents of which he rarely knows much and never knows about Of fertilizers which vary widely in composition and still more widely. in actual effect; of see nor defend himself against; and of labor which is the nearest to con- st&nt of any factor in his problem.
 He must put in, not just one crop, for the chances of failure in any one are always so balanced that such faTna- ing means eventual i7npoverishment and economic slavery,-like the south in the days when it raised nothing but cotton.-no: just one crop but several so that. if some fail, others will serve as anchors to windWard to save him from drifting into starvation He must put them into soil about which he is not certain, despite his most careful study and his most shrewdly treasured experience; he must put the { full amount of labor upon them from the beginning; he must foster them and coddie them and medicine them and trained-nurse them and then he must depend wholly upon the weather and tfe season as to whether he gets a crop or a failure. In other words, he has to work as hard as any other laboring man on earth, work longer hours than most others, all for a gam bler's chance at a profit, without any certainty of that, nor even of ten cents a day wakges for his work.
 Will any working farmer with twenty five years experience at the business behind him tell me I'm put ting that too strong?
 So much for the. question of profit on what the farmer produces. How about the selling
 The ordinary. nlerchandizer doesn't produce. He buys what somebody else has produced as cheap. as he can and sells 1t to the eorsunler as dear as he can. His profit comes solely by pass ing the stuff from his left hand, which extends towards the manufacturer, to his right hand, which reaches out to. the consumer. He knows beforehand what he has to pay and his expert training, developed from long restric- tion to just one single function, en- ables him to foresee very closely what he can get.
 But the farmer. who has first been, manufactures, taking all the risks and all the chances of any manufaeturer and about a score more not known to ordinary manufacturing, must now, having surmounted all that part of his. climb. sell his product in market where prices fuctuate so widely and so suddenly and so erratically as to resemble nothing more nearly than the orbit of a blue-bott1e fly in a hot room. Nothing is more common than drop of from fifty to eighty per cent in the market price for many truck products in less than a week. The market for cereal and other 
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