Vernon Parish Democrat. (Leesville, La.) 1917-193?, 1922-01-12
New Agricultural Methods and Machin-
cry Puts the Small Farmer in
an Impossible Competition
With Large Farm.
By George D. Coleman

It would be absurd for a weaver to
try to compete with hand loom and
foot-power against the big incorporat-
ed companies mills. Even these big
mills do not spin their own yarn, but
buy it from big mills that produce moth
ing else but yarn. Modern successful
farming cannot compete with farms of
so to 100 acres; for the day of the
tractor, the battery pillow, and the use
of power and the practice of farming
on large scale have come to stay, and
the agricultural corporations are in
creasing in number, and the small far
mer has been reduced to poverty-strick-
en- tenantry The only small farmer
who can compete with the present
trend of agricultural development and
not be reduced to poverty, must have
some specialty-poultry. hogs, market
garden near good market, or some
thing that holds a steady line of Gus
toners near at hand; for if he has to
ship any distance, the railroads, whose
motto and practice is: Charge all the
traffic will bear" and THEN SOME,
will take all the values he produces;
and if they don't, then the commission
merchants, the municipal markets, con-
trolled by grating, greedy politicians,
will get what little is left. When labor
saving shoe machinery was first in
troduced, the Knights of Saint Crispin,
trade union of shoemakers, tried to
organize cooperative shoe factories to
save their members from being indus
trial slaves and legal economic chat
tells; but the human element-the
shoemakeYs were such everlasting idiots
and boobs they had not even the sense
of hogs which will defend one another,
but rather the idiocy of sheep-was
such that there are no shoemakers as
we once knew them, but men who at
tend lasting, or heeling, or other
machine and are only animated parts
of a machine owned by the great shoe
machinery trust. which sells no ma
chimes, but RENTS them to the big
shoe factory corporations, who must
charge that rent to the jobber, who |
passes it on to the wholesaler with his
profit, and he to the retailer; and the
American public wonder why with |
shoes manufactured by machinery at
very little cost above the price of ma
terial and with hides and leather low,
shoes and boots are up in airplanes. |
And so with agriculture. Oats in
South Dakota l5c bushel of 90 lbs,
and an ounce of two of cooked oat-
meal with water added costs Zoe in
city restaurants. There is no vocation
where cooperation is so urgently de-
handed by economic evolution as in
Farmers are being trans
formed from small farm owners into
tenants. Those who are not yet ten
ants are getting poorer every year.
The Railroads. commission men, and
a host of ECONOMIC VERMIN prey
upon them, and yet they produce the
food and raw material for clothing.
What is the plain common-sense, horse
sense remedy for these things? 1t is
union cooperation, and a sense that
those who produce these things should
enjoy at least decent part of what
thew r1roc,,ca WTL. L. Il
done SO long years ago? Excuse me
if | speak the naked truth in blunt.
brusque terms: 1t is because the Amer
lean farmer is ignorant. Here in Yer
non Parish, where the Llano Co-opera-
tive Colony sets them an example, they
do not yet recognize what a benefit
and aid to their material progress and
intellectual awakening it is to have the
Colony here. The management is lib
eral, open-minded, and progressive