Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 56, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 March 1915 — DRAW WEALTH FROM FARMS [ARTICLE]

DRAW WEALTH FROM FARMS

Enormous Sum Annually Gathered in by Tillers of the Soil In the United States. From Farms in 1914 the United States produced a yield worth $10,000,000,000. Could cotton have been marketed as usual the total would have been close to half a billion more. Ten billion dollars representing honest work! Ten billion dollars untainted money! And going mostly into the pockets of the workers themselves, with little reaching the purses of labor exploiters. The beautiful thing about this great item of our national wealth, next to its cleanliness, is the fact that it can be increased indefinitely by a more general adoption of scientific agriculture. In fifteen years it has been doubled; and still, on our new soil, we farm only a third as effectively as do many foreign peoples on soil centuries longer in use. The forest, cut unwisely, is gone. The mineral, once mined, is not renewable. But on his broad acres the tiller of the soil can take and take again; and though he; has to fertilize, the more he does it the more he earns. So, come war, come pestilence, come anything but conti-nent-wide drought, herd is a broad base for our future welfare, upon which we can build expandingly and securely. The man with the hoe is, indeed, the best hope of the future.