FARMERS IN THE UNITED STATES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3713, 12 May 1925, Page 12

FARMERS IN THE UNITED STATES.

Some aspects in connection with the plight of farmers in tii© United States, as featured in a book by Herbert Quick, entitled “The Heal Trouble With Farmers,” wih, we believe, appeal to many farmers in New Zealand. Our settlers, as is the case with farmers in America, have for some time now experienced the advantages or disadvantages of artificial aids ; such as the fixing or regulating of prices of some of the things they have to sell. It is a truism to say that agriculture is the source of all wealth. Many perhaps realise the truth of that assertion, and yet strangle or vitiate the real settler’s endeavours to make a home. He has been a restless individual ever since the values of primary products commenced to rise, with the consequent improved prices ruling for land. Most persons will agree with what one of our contemporaries has well said —that the decline of agriculture ought to be checked in New Zealand as in Britain—and they will also agree, we think, in the conclusion that the industry must —to a very great extent—work out its own salvation. External and artificial

aids may help a young industry to gain strength, or an old one to tide over a difficult period, but they cannot be permanently relied upon to keep alive an old industry that has lost its economic basis. At the moment, however, we are concerned with the conditions in America of farmers, as depicted by Herbert Quick, and outlined by the Hon. Lynn J. Frazier, of North Dakota, in the Senate of the United States as recently as January, 1926. “Out West,” we are told, there is no such thing as cheap land in the United States. That which seems cheap is dear at any price, and ought to bear no price. Tlie vampire which sucks the blood of American farmers is land values, and no tariff or guaranty of prices, etc., will remedy matters, as such fictitious aids mean inflated values, which are soon vitiated by rising land values. Farm tenantry would seem to be a big factor affecting the circumstances of the American farmer. Farm tenantry has increased (or land held under mortgage, which is practically the same thing) until three-fourths of the holdings in tne States are in bondage, and the holders, we gather, are bled white. This is due in a measure to high land values, and owing to settlers being at grips with the men who do the seasonal labour on the farms. What is happening? Just what one might expect. The rich people in the country towns and town cormorants buy farms like rich ladies buy diamonds. It brings, it is alleged, social distinction to sutch towns dwellers. Upon economic values have piled speculative values. Statistics show that land is passing into the hands of people rich enough to own high-priced lands, and the average size of farms is increasing. Such palliatives as are devised from time to time—lower freight rates, etc.—all in the end push up land values and benefit landowners and landlords. In an endeavour to discover the basic trouble with agriculture Mr Quick declares that high land values are to blame. He points out that the tribute levied on industry, commerce, and manufacturing by urban land values is even greater than that imposed by farm land values, but it is the farmers’ plight which “gets one down.” The remedy? According to our authority, what will cure agriculture of its diseases iB a state of things in which good land will be once more cheap, so that a poor man can own it, and in which everything done by or for the farmers will not at once curse them with high land values and increased rents. The first necessary of life is land. It comes before even such thinks as food and shelter, and we cannot have either of these without access to land. The grossest error of mankind is the thought that, high land values mean good to man. We fall into that destructive mistake because with land monopolised all good to man is reflected in increasing land values. The high price of our land, however, comes from the good to humanity, and not the good to humanity from tlie land values. This is a fundamental distinction.

The author declares further that we shall go on from Iwid to worse if we cannot make land cheap once more. Our good, cheap land is gone. Our problem is to get it back again, in city and country. We shall get it back again if society is destroyed, but it will not do anybody any good in that case. Mesopotamia must once have had high land values; but when the hordes of Central Asia overwhelmed it they destroyed the land values with the society which built them up. Whother legislation can be devised, ns suggested, to make land cheap seems scarcely practical, but one never knows; and in case those who care to learn more about the “vampire” of the America farmer, etc., as suggested by Mr Herbert Quick in his book, can pursue the subject further for themselves.