FARM CREDITS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 28 April 1922, Page 3

FARM CREDITS.

BANKS ASSAILED

Agricultural credit or financing was ! the subject that overshadowed ail others at the National Agricultural Conference' summoned by President Harding to consider the present plight of American agriculture and needed remedies. The conference was at Washington sitt.jig when the last mails left. The. present banking system was assailed by delegates as being devised to meet the demands of manufacturers and commerce, and not adapted to the needs of agriculture, because the farmer so often could not, it was said, get accommodation from the banks at legal interest rates, and was driven to "time-price" merchants and Shy lock money-lending lawyers, who made him pay ten times the legal rate of interest. They demanded a system of credit, not so long as the five to forty years Federal Land Bank loans, but more prolonged than the 90 days' notice of the commercial bank. "We will reduce our production," said one delegate, "until the world gets to the point where it is willing to give somewhere about one day of factory labour for one day of farm labour. As far as possible we will produce everyI thing we need at home. We will set | out to avoid paying freights and middlemen's profits on food and feed, or anything else we can profitably j grow ourselves. We will try and stuff

the land with fertility, and have it ready for making 'money crops' when it will bo profitable to make them." The debate on the question of wage deflation was long and vehement. It was strenuously opposed by Samuel Gompers, president of the United States Federation of Labour, who was a delegate. A proposal was made to I bring down wages of railway and trans- < portation labour to a parity with the I return received by the farmer, bxit a » resolution was finally passed that both , | railways and other employees be in--1 elude if in the scheme for readjustment 'of wages. j The conference adopted a resolution . asking for legislation providing for ; short terms of credit, of from six j months to three years, on agricultural I paper to meet farmers' requirements. llt was also decided to seek authority 1 for the Federal Reserve Banks to deal . in, with or without the endorsement '; cf the member banks, notes secured b> ■ warehouse receipts, covering murket- ', able, non-perishable staples, or by live stork, of the kinds and maturity ni- j ready eligible for rediscount under existing legislation. ; Other resolutions of the conference included the appointment of a farmer to the Federal Reserve Eciird, and due

representation on the Federal Reserve Banks; the Federal farmers' loan system to be extended from ten thousand dollars to twenty-five thousand dollars; 'that joint -stock banks be allowed to issue bonds in the amount of twenty times their capital: that a Federal crop insarar.ee bureau be 'established.