The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-04-27
LlTCHFlELD FARM
 OWNER ASKS WHAT
 PLANTING IS DONE
Says Talk Will Avail Moth. ing With Connecticut Sea-
 son Fast Going.

week of blowing is gone, and two
 weeks more has yet to come. How
 far has the deficiency in fall blowing
 been made up? Has any systematic attempt been made to reach the mass of small farmers of the state and convince them that it would be for \ the mutual benefit of producer and consumer to plant an increased acre. iage?
 l. A love feast of the wealthy tobac- leo growers of the Connecticut river valley has been held at Hartford this I week, and they have agreed to- with draw one or more acres each from tobacco culture, and put it into grain or lentils. To balance this, the past week has seen the auctioning off of stock, and closing down of the fol- lowing large farms in Litchfield county alone; The Seeley Dairy farm of Washington, with 128 cows; the
 William Atwood Dairy farm of Wa
 tertown, with cattle, wagons, tools; the Andrew C. Clark Dairy farm of
 New Milford, with 25 cows; big II dairy farm in the town of Morris, l Conn.
 II The inexorable logic of events il forces Sthe dairy farmer to close down 1 and sell out Farm labor is very
 scarce and high, all feed is very high, and the margin between outgo and T intake is so slight that the farmer !, can no longer carry this "old man of the sea on his back I mean the middle man who peddles the milk in the cities; whether it is the New Ha- | ven Dairy company, or Bryant & 1 Chapman for Hartford, or Borden of lNew York for the Litchfield county producers.
 You have got to take the bull by the horns, and do precisely what Den
 mark did years ago, what California is doing today for it's citrus crop, and
 what the state of New York, through I it's departments of food and markets, is doing to help the upstate dairyman
 market his product in New York city. l The state of Connecticut has got to establish .pasteurizing plant in every large city, and distribute the
 milk direct to the consumer, at cost I for the farmer. This is what the
 Rhode Island state commission re- ] commended for Providence a year ago. Of course men of capital. like
 Wilson Lee of Orange, the Stoddards
 of Milford, the Dairy commissioner,
 Stadtmueller of Hartford, can market l
 but that is not true of the small dairymen of the state. If they are l going to be able to show a profit sell | ing on close margin, with the pre-
 vailing high prices, they cannot stand
 the expense of the middle man who l waxes fat on their efforts.
 What does this mean to the city population? Why you cannot have any cash crop of potatoes or beans or lcabbage or low priced eggs. unless the farmer can run his dairy. The monthly milk check keeps the plant running. Now you are not going gen. orally to get the farmer to increase Ihis acreage unless you advance him 1.-the capital on easy terms. and mind you, you are going to want next fall
 desperately, not merely flour and cornmeal, but round steak and pork chops, and eggs. To put in a crop costs money. To illustrate, I have | just bought a 200-acre farm in Ltch- field county. simply planned this year to put some young stock on my pasture, cut my hay, build silo, and
 modest dairy barn, put in acres in corn. but made up my mind I would be patriotic, and try and raise some
 food for our people next fall, and so | S1S ndpp0ucu IO nave LIVE dCIOS Ol flat land admirably adapted for light truck crops, am piping down water 1 from hill, so shall be independent of drought, and I am going to put five acres in beans and potatoes and cabbage, and am buying half -doz- en brood sows that will farrow next | month, and am putting in pasture crops of rye, Canada peas and oats, Essex rape, soy beans and velvet
 beans, and I am spending $500, in hog fencing my woodland and I hope by next December to have 50 plump pigs, weighing ITO to 200 pounds
 each, which will be my contribution to the meat supply of the Common wealth, but all this takes money and the average small farmer does not know where to go to get a loan, and does not believe it would be given to him if he asked for it.
 Now, if England is so far away that we cannot see what she is doing, we ought to at least wake up to what our neighbors are doing on either side of us. The New York legislature. or
 is it the Association of New York bankers rather, have placed fund of $10,0OO,00O at the service of the
 farmers, to be loaned out in small sums, not IO oXCSeU S0VV to an 1nQ1- vidual prior to June 1, to be applied to the planting of new crops. No se-
 curity demanded of the farmer, ex-
 cept his personal note. Those wide
 awake, hustling live wires, those busi-
 ness men of Hampden county, Massa- chusetts have raised $100,000 to be loaned to the farmers around Spring.
 field to increase their planting acre.
 age.
 Now what has our state legislature done? Spend most of the week fight ing Woman Suffrage; discussing whether they will have cold storage
 eggs stamped with the date and
 whether man can go; to a moving
 picture show on Sunday.
 He won't have any money in his pocket to go to the moving picture
 shows this fall, the high price of food will take it all, and he may have to
 stay in bed to warm his i'll nourished body, for we are certainly going to
 have meat famine. A pork is about the quickest meat to grow, and that takes eight months. Do our business
 men think that they have done their
 whole duty in this crisis, when they have poined the Home Guard, and
 put an American flag in their coat lapel?
 ROGER S. BALDWIN, Conn. Agricultural College, 9 Glass 1916 S. Woodbury. Conn, April 21. 1917.