Agricultural depression

“ Unless the nation is willing to go back to protection for agriculture, which I am glad to believe in the general interest unthinkable, and unless it is willing to guarantee the farmer against loss from that method of agriculture which means most production and most employment, we must let the farmer set the tune and farm in the way it best suits him to farm. We must try, in fact, not to talk too much nonsense about intensive production as the cure for agricultural depression. ”

“ The immediate cause of agricultural depression is the catastrophic fall in the world prices of foodstuffs as compared with other prices, this fall being due in large measure to the deflation of currency and credit. ”

“ The continued agricultural depression ruined many tillers of the soil, and drove the rural population more and more into the already overcrowded towns. There they bid against the laboring men for work, and so reduced wages to the lowest point. ”

“ Many, indeed, have been driven from their estates, while others can only live on them by letting the mansion house and the shooting, and occupying some small house on the lands they are reluctant to leave. The agricultural depression, which set in about 1875, may in short be said to have effected a minor social revolution, and to have completed the ruin of the old landed aristocracy as a class. ”

“ The owner in fee and life tenant, the occupier, whether of large or of small holding, whether under lease, or custom, or agreement, or the provisions of the Agricultural Holdings Act—all without distinction have been involved in a general calamity.” The two most prominent causes assigned for the depression were bad seasons and foreign competition, aggravated by the increased cost of production and the heavy losses of live stock. Abundant evidence was forthcoming as to the extent to which agriculture had been injuriously affected by an unprecedented succession of bad seasons. ”

“ A drought had shortened the grain crop, killed great numbers of cattle and lessened the gold supply, and the losses that the farming, ranching, and mineral regions suffered affected all the commercial and industrial activities of the State, so that there was a general depression. ”

“ Last year's poor crop - the smallest since the early 1950s - reflects both increased idle land on state-controlled farms and extreme pessimism among many remaining private farmers, who failed even to plant wheat. ”

“ The corners of the world are ransacked for figures to bear out so dire a prediction. Decreasing acreage devoted to wheat, reduced yield of crops, falling per-capita consumption of wheat, and market prices that seem to bear out the fact of an approaching if not existing famine, every incident of depression is carefully collated, and a picture drawn which casts into shade the fearfulest famine experienced in the world's history. ”

“ The agricultural collapse of the last ten years has certainly been increased by the insufficient employment of labour. Every one who knows farms intimately is aware that this is the case. Hay crops have been lost and corn crops have been lost because, when there was an interval of fine weather, there were not hands enough to get the harvest in. ”

“ Feeding great numbers of domestic animals with nothing but compound feed burdened the farmers with heavy debts, and this situation remains unchanged to the present day. [18] But an even greater problem is that the loss of domestic animals to the farmer has resulted in the loss of manure (compost) to be returned to the soil, and this has in turn resulted in the forced use of larged amounts of chemical fertilizers and agricultural chemicals, and the weakening of food plants because of damage to the soil. ”

“ A continuance of similar conditions—and no change is in sight—must mean partial food famine and hardship prices in the home market; an annual indebtedness abroad which, having no foodstuffs to spare, we must pay in cash; and financial depression and industrial misfortune because we have drawn too unwisely upon the soil. This impending misfortune, only the conservation of a neglected soil and all the interests connected with it can avert. ”

“ Ignorant, superstitious, and condemned to a life of unrequited toil and unredressed wrongs, the mental and moral condition of the agricultural poor was wretchedly low. Huddled together in mud cottages, through the rotten thatches of which the rain penetrated; clothed with rough garments that were seldom changed night or day; feeding on coarse food, and that in insufficient quantities,—their physical condition was one of extreme misery. ”

“ The depression of the past four years has fallen with especial severity upon the great body of toilers of the country, and upon none more than the holders of small farms. Agriculture has languished and labor suffered. ”

“ In view of this knowledge, it is not surprising that thousands of farmers, employing, often carelessly agricultural methods developed in humid sections, have found only hardships and poverty on the present dry-farm empire of the United States. ”

“ The damage caused by war and the dislocation of agricultural production resulting from the shortage and dislocation of labor, the removal of draught animals, the shortage of fertilizers and other circumstances connected with the war have caused a serious fall in world production of wheat. In addition, a large number of countries, including some of those which are normally the largest producers of grain, have suffered serious droughts and have therefore reaped abnormally small crops. ”

“ At the same time, heavy stress has been laid on the improvement of farm techniques and on mechanization as means for increasing yields and production. A planned expansion of livestock herds and of the output of livestock products has been hampered by inadequate incentives for peasants and by a shortage of fodder. The agricultural potential is limited by the predominance of rugged mountain terrain and by frequent spring droughts that cause extensive damage to crops. To minimize the adverse effects of the droughts, an extensive irrigation system is being developed. ”

“ When the farmer raises crops for sale, and removes his grain and grasses from the land, he sells a portion of his soil; and if he does not renew in some way the saline matters taken away in his crops, he invariably impoverishes his farm. This work of exhaustion is now going on to an alarming extent, and the prolific wheat lands are to be searched for farther and farther westward as the operation proceeds. ”

“ The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the slovenly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his household gods to a fresher soil. The extent of cleared ground required for agricultural use depends very much on the number and kinds of the cattle bred. ”

“ Such an equilibrium, could it once be established, would possibly continue for long periods of time, but in the end would no doubt lead to disaster; for, unless the very cornerstone of modern agricultural science is unsound, there will be ultimately a diminution of crop producing power if continuous cropping is practiced without returning to the soil a goodly portion of the elements of soil fertility taken from it. The real purpose of modern agricultural researeh is to maintain or increase the productivity of our lands; if this cannot be done, modern agriculture is essentially a failure. ”

“ Any such climatic change would quite probably be unequal in its effects, disrupting agricultural systems in areas that provide a large proportion of the world's cereal harvests and perhaps triggering mass population momements in areas where hunger is already endemic. ”

“ It is only in the case of continuous and considerable depressions that the cause is in action long enough to produce discernible effects.
The most common, and by far the most important, case where the depression in one trade causes depression in all others, is that of depressed agriculture. When the agriculture of the world is ill off, food is dear. And as the amount of absolute necessaries which a people consumes cannot be much diminished, the additional amount which has to be spent on them is so much subtracted from what used to be spent on other things. ”

“ We had the farm crisis in the eighties... consolidation in agriculture that has forced the little guy off his land... and more recently, drought that has turned productive land into dry patches of dust. Rural economies have shrunk and small towns have died. Opportunity is hard to come by. ”

“ America's farmers have helped to build this new prosperity, but far too many of our farming communities are not reaping its benefits. Flood and drought and crop disease have wiped out entire harvests in some parts of the country. Plummeting prices here at home and collapsing markets in Asia have threatened the livelihood of some farming communities.
Wherever we live and whatever work we do, every American has a stake in the strength of rural America. America's farmers are the backbone of our economy and the lifeblood of our land. ”

“ No doubt the position of agriculture as a whole has very much improved since the depression of three and four years ago. But there are many localities and many groups of individuals, apparently through no fault of their own, sometimes due to climatic conditions and sometimes to the prevailing price of a certain crop, still in a distressing condition. ”

“ Speculation in land has been creating a class of non-resident agricultural capitalists and tenant cultivators, and has been transforming the type of agricultural population over large sections of country. Soil exhaustion is leading to abandonment of the poorest land and is compelling methods of scientific agriculture on the remainder. These conditions are producing their own social problems for the rural community. ”

“ The fact of the depression—if we may use so mild a term in respect to a branch of industry which is now merely existing upon capital, not by income—is beyond all possibility of doubt or cavil. The causes of it are obvious; and it now only remains to be seen whether we can afford to [638] allow agriculture to be extinguished from among us, or at best raised to that point which will afford a bare subsistence to the grower, without the risk of involving the rest of us in a like calamity. ”

“ Only at harvest-time, in the warm summer and autumn nights, he camps out among his crops, to thresh them on the spot, and bring the produce home, a habit which often produces fever and ague. Year after year the process is repeated; no improvement is ever made; if rain falls the harvest is plentiful—so plentiful sometimes that the lazy peasant will not reap his most distant fields, or procure new skins or barrels for the over-abundant wine, though with the extension of railways this evil is fast disappearing. ”

“ At the North, some farmers put in nothing but wheat; others, nothing but corn. One relies on the hay crop; another makes or loses a year’s profits on cattle. In each case, if the staple raised happens to hit, in every respect profits roll in like a flood. But such operations leave no margin for those casualties, and annual changes, which are inevitable.
Ireland, relying upon the potato as a support for a large mass of its poverty-stricken people, is visited with famine if this crop is shaken. The failure of the grain crop, in England, strikes panic into the whole nation. ”

“ These emergency work projects provide money to buy food and clothing for the winter; they keep the livestock on the farm; they provide seed for a new crop, and, best of all, they will conserve soil and water in the future in those areas most frequently hit by drought.
If, for example, in some local area the water table continues to drop and the topsoil to blow away, the land values will disappear with the water and the soil. People on the farms will drift into the nearby cities; the cities will have no farm trade and the workers in the city factories and stores will have no jobs. ”

“ One day, just as the early sown wheat was beginning to throw a tinge of green over the brown earth, a tremendous wind arose from the southwest and blew with such devastating fury that the soil, caught up from the field, formed a cloud, hundreds of feet high,—a cloud which darkened the sky, turning noon into dusk and sending us all to shelter. All the forenoon this blizzard of loam raged, filling the house with dust, almost smothering the cattle in the stable. Work was impossible, even for the men. The growing grain, its roots exposed to the air, withered and died. ”

“ All through that wretched summer, scorching drought alternating with cloud-bursts vied with each other in blasting the hopes of the farmers, and premature frost destroyed the few remaining stalks of corn, so that when the winter snows came, gaunt famine stared our family fiercely in the face. ”

“ If continued soil depletion is practiced, ultimate failure is the only future for such investments.
That vast areas of land once cultivated with profit in the original thirteen states now lie agriculturally abandoned is common knowledge; and that the farm lands of the great Corn Belt and Wheat Belt of the North-Central states are even now undergoing the most rapid soil depletion ever witnessed is known to all who possess the facts. ”

“ The best members of the farming classes have got so much in arrear in their subscriptions that they have declined to appear or to dine with their neighbours, and general depression damps the spirit of the most industrious and hitherto prosperous cultivators. ”

“ The primary cause of famine almost invariably has been a failure of food crops. This failure has often resulted from a variety of natural causes—long-continued drought, blasting hot winds, insect armies, earthquakes, severe and untimely frosts, and destructive inundations.
But war also brings in its train crop shortage by withdrawing from the fields the men required to till the soil, and by devastating harvest land in order that an enemy may be vanquished through starvation. ”