The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-09-15
Washington, D. c.

Washington, D, C, N Y the time this letter is published TX Uncle sam army of farmers will ~ have harvested more than soo,oVo'- ooo bushels of wheat l40o,oo0,ooo bushels of oats and 9OO,OOoooO bushels of barley and rye. It will have dug from the ! sround something like 5o0.o0o0oo bushels of notatoes and will be gathering a corn cron of more than a,000.o00 of bushels. Al the same time we shall be picking cot ion to the amount of more than l9,oVV' : ooo hales. and shall have yet to harvest .n anple crop of over 2000o0 bushels. Tn edition to all this we shall be curing +obacco weighing something like l,OOo,ooo'- 600 pounds and shall be storing away in barns and stacks hay worth more than s1 500 ,00o. Our whole farm crop of this year, 1918, in quantity and value, will be greater than any ever gathered bv any nation and it will have come from more acres than we have ever cul- ti,ated before. our old lands have been intensiveIv tiled. and in addition some thing like 2S,00OooO acres of new ground has been put under the blow buheh lh's new territory together and 1t VIII naNe state almost as big as either Ohio, Kentucky or Virginia.
 As to the value of the farm crops Of 1918, the Secretary of Agriculture has estimated that it will aggregate more than S21, 600 o0o,o0o, or more than 40 times as much as all the gold that has been taken out of this big, round earth since Columbus discovered America. At s2 8 bushel the wheat crop will sell for more than s1 600, ,O0O0oO; and the cotton at "A cents a pound will bring more than the wheat. The corn which, at this writing, is worth 76 cents bushel, will have d value of more than 2,000000,00o; and the 100000 GOO tons of hay will be worth something like S16 a ton, or enough to give ss0 to every family in the United States and leave some to spare. If all the crops that we shall get from our farms and gardens this year could be reduced to dollars, and the mighty sum divided evenly among us, every man, woman and child in the United States would have more than s20o and every family 5000. And all this would come from the farms.
 This statement gives some idea of what the farmers have been doing in the darkest labor times of our his- tory. To use & common expression of this day of industrial wonders, they have accomplished the impossible, and that against odds as great if not greater than those prevailing on the battle fields of Europe. This letter is to show something of how the work has been done and the prospects of its continuance during the war.
 In the first place, let us look at the conditions when the crops were put in. There was a great shortage of farm hands. For more than 20 years this class of labor has been growing less and less. The country boys have been going to the city and there has been a steady emigration of families from the farms to the towns, This exodus has greatly increased since the war broke out in Europe. Our muni- tions plants which were at work for the allies paid the highest of wages and the men who were tilling the soil found that they could get three or four times as much by leaving the farms for the factories. At the same time the farm labor supply was further cut down by the aliens living in the United States who were called to Ger many, Italy, Greece, the Balkans and other places to take part in the war