Arizona republican., 1920-12-22
By Ray s. Owens

0y nay Os O"CHS
 l As I tourneyed into the Salt River valley last Tuesday my impression was that of entering through the doors of 1 a great factory, which was making great quantities of quality cotton, all
 falfa, wheat, fruit and other commodi ties.
 Here, masters of your trade, you are working under ideal conditions, in | 300,O00 acres of factory space under
 one roof of sunshine. producing goods
 to the total value of $43,000,000 per
 year, with a property upon which you
 place an assessed valuation of $135,-
 000,000.
 I wonder if any of you realize your
 wonderful accomplishment as do some
 of your visitors. You know sometimes
 We get too close to our jobs and lose
 perspective. According to your cham
 Der of commerce pamphlet, printed in
 June of this year, your great factory
 here employed 34,4SS workers in 1910,
 and in that year you produced 2,S00, ,000
 worth of goods. At that time you
 figured your property in at (assessed
 valuation) $17.SO0.544.
 In 1919 your factory employed 92,-
 900 people Gan increase, by the way,
 of 16 per day for the entire period).
 you produced $43,225,200 worth of
 goods, and you placed your valuation
 at $1,000,667.
 For the nineyear period, you have
 increased the number of people on
 your payroll 267 per cent You have
 increased your output 1900 per cent
 and have increased the value of your
 factory $50 per cent. Your per capita
 or per workman plant production was
 $5l6.74 in 1910, and 1t was $1, 1,094.03 in
 1919; something over 100 per cent in
 crease.
 Many of your new workmen have
 invested money in this great enter
 prise, too, so that they have received
 an excellent living for their work, and
 in addition they have more than in
 creased their money value over five
 times.
 Truly a wonderful accomplishment
 and one the world should know more
 about
 Naturally I wanted to know how
 you accomplished all this and here is
 how I analyze it. First, you took
 possession of a factory that nature
 already had built in an ideal location
 and in a climate that is wonderfully
 well suited to all year production. Sec ond, you harnessed Salt river and
 made it supply you with power and water in ample quantity. Third, you equipped your factory with the best tools you could get, then with an enormous, but extremely wise invest ment in plant and equipment, you procured supply of the best seed
 available in the world markets. or ganized your workers and went to production.
 For the past 10 years you have ad- ded to your organization at the rate oi Is per day. Each new one added his
 labors to the total the factory pro- duced and added to the profits. Fortunate in your excellent plant location you were already producing more per acre and more per worker
 than most of your competitors, but be- ing live, wideawake business men, as we'll as hard workers. you constantly sought to decrease your cost of pro-
 duction and add in that way to youl
 total earnings, so that you have kept right on investing part of your earn
 ings in new and better tools. Two general classes of tools are
 used in every factory. First, there are tools of transformation which arc
 used to transform the fraw material
 into the finished product In this fac- tory here your transformation tools are the blow, the cultivators, the har- vester, the cotton gin and tractor
 etc. Second, and in many factories
 more important in their effect on the cost of production are. tools of trans portation, which in your factory are T SuSii lOOlS yOuI wagons, your motor trucks, your automobiles and the
 roads over which they must travel the railroad locomotives, trains and the track over which they travel Al
 tools of any kind are labor saving de vices used to increase production pei man and to decrease costs of the things people use and need to live with.
 Perhaps not many people have | fh0Ip1f ne J, or as a labor and time saving device Nor have they attached to roads the idea of saving in their hauling costs
 and the consequent increased earn ings. Sometimes people think that
 roads are sort of a luxury and their cost as an expense.
 An authority who is an executive oi one or our great American steel cor porations found that the cost of pro- ducing steel was 90 per, cent trans portation, and only 10 per cent trans < formation. He counted cost as be- q ginning with taking the ore out of the mines and ended with delivery of bars, sheets and shapes to the care fol shipment to the users. In other fac
 tories cost of transportation inside the factory during the manufacturine process, runs from 9 per cent of the 3 total cost up
 How much do you spend for trans portation here in Maricopa county & prior to the time you deliver your
 goods to the railroads?
 Another authority tells us that the railroads of the United States carry p per cent of our total tonnage and that 70 per cent is handled over our highways. What would you think of a railroad which attempted to r1n I Its trains over tracks no heavier or better than the tracks over which the first American railroad train in 1834 run from Albany to Schnectady. Al most impossible to even think of ae a business proposition, and vet there are those who are content and who S insist that we continue to haul 75 nc, cent Of our total tonnage over high x ways no better than were built ir N 1884.
 No less than one million tons oI goods are hauled over the highway, of Maricopa county in a single year ana the hauhng cost goes on whether
 prices are good or not Ninety pei cent of your crops are shipped h, & rail to another part of the country 9 The other fellow pays the freight bill
 but you pay the freight costs of haul # Ing from your farms to the railroads The Standard Oil company's record,
 show that they get 3.7 miles per gal
 Ion out of their motor trucks in Ari
 zona, and that with identicallv in,
 same equipment they get 5.S mile
 per gallon in California, 57 per cen
 more tons hauled per mile. to sa, H.