Morris tribune., 1919-07-04
one of these old-fashfnoned, home

one of these old-fashinoned, home
spun, homemade dresses?
AS l said before, there were no
stockyards, no much-denounced pack
ers. What livestock there was, and
there wasn't very much, was mostly
slaughtered on the farm, and that
could be done only in the winter
season. The farmer sailed or picked
much of the meat and in the spring
dried or smoked the hams, bacon, and
shoulders and traded them to the
storekeepers for the few necessities
that he had to buy. l have bought
or traded for tons of that same
smoked meat for the magnificent price
of from six to ten cents per pound.
Other farm products were at cor
respondingly low prices: butter, from
five to sixteen cents per pound; eggs,
from five to ten cents per dozen;
dressed hogs, three to five cents per
pound; beef, about the same price;
corn, fifteen to twenty-five cents per
bushel; peas, forty to fifty cents per
bushel; wheat, eighty cents to one
dollar per bushel. But it cost two
or three times as much to produce a
bushel of wheat in those days as in
recent years.
Those were cheap days; that is,
what the farmer had to sell was
cheap, but not so with the necessi-
ties he had to buy. Among the things
he to buy or trade his cheap farm
products for were al goods made
from cotton, such as ginghams, cali
Goes and light goods, and they were
as high or higher than at present.
Sugar, tea, coffee, kerosene, nails
and hardware were as high or higher
than at present wartime prices, and
very much higher than the prices we
paid for those things previous to the
late war,
I almost forgot to say that among
the cheap things in those good old
days was whiskey. Whiskey was
cheap. For ten cents over the bar
you could get enough for comfort
able jag; for twenty-five cents, at
wholesale price, you could buy
enough to make a threshing crew
glorious happy for a day or two
Maybe that is why some people say:
"Those were the good old days when
we were young"
If there is any one thing that has
helped to increase the price Of land
more than others, it is the greatly in
creased production Of livestock on
the farm, and that was made possible
by the packer. Farmers and con-
sumers have shared in the great saw
! ing resulting from the efficient and
economic Strengthening Of stock. The
old SKINNY cow that was almost
worthless not so long ago, the pack
er, by cooking and removing from the
bones the little meat there is. by
making the bones into bone meal,
the blood into blood meal, the stOm-
ach into high-priced food, her tail
into soup, in fact, converting her
horns. hOofs, and all parts of her old
carcass into something valuable, has
made the old cow bring the farmer
more money in recent years than a
irst-class COW would bring a few
years ago.
The packer has furnished to the
farmer or stOckgrower an everyday
in-the-year market for his stock.
There is no day too hot or too cold
but what there is a market and cash
for farm products. His cold storage
refrigerator cars and ships have made
it possible to distribute perishable
farm products cheaply and quickly
from the farm to consumers all over
the world. And the farmer has
shared in the profits of his enter
prise.
And there is the big modern mill
with it's efficient and labor-saVing
devices, it's modern cleaning machin-
cry, making it possible to take the
poor and smutty wheat, clean, wash
and scour it and convert it into good
flour that sells at top prices. In our
bOyhood days all these things were
impossible; and in small flour mills,
are now prohibitive because they can
not afford to have the necessary ma
chinery to compete with the large
mills. The little old-fashioned mills