AGRICULTURAL CRISIS.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19960, 21 June 1930, Page 4

AGRICULTURAL CRISIS.

WORLD-WIDE CONDITIONS. With a crisis in fanning in Great Britain and a near crisis in the . United States writes a Canadian economist, it is not too much to admit that Canadian farmers have faced a serious situation. As always happens at such a time, there are people ready to offer unlimited advice to meet the problems. The farmers themselves are discussing in little groups and in public meetings tho best means of > overcoming their difficulties. Tho writer ' proposes to give tho views he has heard expressed during the past few weeks. Tho advico most frequently handed but is that farmers must become accustomed to low prices for their products, and meet them by reducing the cost 3 of production.* Wo are told that power farming means the economic salvation of ttgricultiwc. Have the urban dwellers of Canada really grasped the significance o£ tho present situation; particularly tho relation of low prices and power farming to the future prosperity of industrial Canada? Power farming means a smaller rural population and a reduction in the volume of the buying power of rural Canada. Power farming means that ono man can do the work that four.men -did formerly. It means that the small farmer on a half or three-quarter section farm will bo forced out of business in the production of cash grain crops. If history repeats itself many of our rural people will be forced off the land. 'During f>art of" the'eighteenth centfary and the early years of tho nineteenth century, thousands of . farmers wero driven off the land in England and Scotland 1?y improved farming methods. They crowded into the cities and ■towns, or emigrated, across the seas. If the same;, thing happens in Canada, can our. cities absorb the-exodus from the .farms! ' ■ • It has been stated that power farming will' bring two results—decrease the price of grain and increase tin volume ,of goods purchased ; by the people i of* the 'West. ,Tlw> writer submits that these things may not happen. Power farming has been partially responsible for the fall /in grain, prices. Lower grain prices have reduced the purchasing ' pdwer of * the Canadian people. Witness the fifty per cent, reduction in automobile ' sales. Will ono family, on a power farm purchase as,much as the four families they displace?. Most assuredly not. The rural population or this section of Manitoba has decreased during the last twenty yars, and' the business of the country towns has decreased in proportion. . • , ■, , The' pressing needs of farming community may be summed up as follows: . ' The prices of commodities the farmer buys must decrease. in the sapio ratio that the . price of grain hqs decreased. Farmers cannot pay 'present prices for their raw material, machinery, clothing, foodstuffs, when the prices of their finished product, the grain the farms produce, remains at • the present level.