The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-07-14
WHEAT PRICE OF
SAC TO FARM Err $
STARTS TROUBLE
Ruination of Poorer
Farmers Seen; Farm
Board Unloading
Soviet Farming Booms
No Capitalist Chaos in
Soviet Union

With Kansas farmers getting Ga
cents a bushel for wheat on the
wagon; with Secretary Hyde of the
Agricultural Department and Chair
man Legge of the Farm Board
nearly mobbed for advising reduc-
tions of wheat acreage; and "con-
sternation gripping the Kansas City
Board of Trade" when the Farm
Board unloaded $4,000 bushels of
wheat it had paid $1.15 a bushel
for last Fall to the Kansas Flour
Mills Company for 78 cents (other
reports say 80 cents) bushel, the
rapidly deepening agrarian crisis is
producing loud political echoes.
Meanwhile, capitalist press dis
patches from the Soviet Union,
give the estimation on American
agriculture of Yakovleff, Soviet
Agricultural Commissar, as in
efficient and bankrupting the poor
err strata of American farmers,
while the Soviet is socializing
agriculture and improvingRthe liv-
ing conditions of the agricultural
population.
Yakovleff's report to the Six
teenth Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union truth
fully relates how American farm
ers are hopelessly overburdened
with mortgages, taxes and high
prices on what they buy compared
with what they sell.
The dispatches state that Yakov-
left pointed out the limitations to
mechanical advance set by capital
ism in agriculture, saying that in
the last ten years American farm
ers had increased the number of
tractors to million, yet the cul-
tivated area increased only 20,-
100000 acres, while it might have
been doubled.
Americans reckon the tractor and
combine fully effective on sown
areas above 500 acres, while the
Soviet knows they are effective
fully only on tracts upwards of
1000 acres. Only 80 per cent of
American farms sow more than
500 acres; while the Soviet, pushing
its program of specialization of agri-
culture, expects to work hundreds
of thousands of tractors at 100
per cent efficiency on state and
collective farms of from 1000 to
100000 acres, and furnish the agri-
cultural population with a life of
security, comfort and culture in so
doing.
In America, what mechanical adj
vance is attained, is ruinous to the
big part of the farm population,
and the Governor of Kansas, Reed,
advocates laws against "chain" or
Industrial farming.
The report states Yakovleff de-
Jared that since 1914, taxes on
american farmers have increased
wo and half times, the prices of
manufactured goods rose 81 per
cent, while agricultural prices rose
only 80 per cent, that interest paid
on debts by American farmers
reaches a total of $800,000,00O
annually, that 1913 of every 1,00C
farms sold in the last four years
are forced sales" under mortgage;
that 40 per cent of the American
farms are operated by renters.
AS pointed out by the United
Farmers League of Bismark, North
Dakota, the poor farmers have only
one way out: To organize, by form
ing committees of action among
their neighbors, by township, con.
Meeting up with the u. F. L., which
is preparing widespread rea
struggle, tenants strikes, tax-pay'
ers' strikes, and fight against
monopoly prices.