Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 164, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1918 — Untitled [ARTICLE]

Following the items of the census of 1910, the United States department of agriculture has estimated the gross value of the wealth produced on farms in 1917 to be $19,444,000,000. This is divided into a total of $13,611,000,000 for all crops and $5,833,000,000 for animal products and animals sold off farms and slaughtered on farms. Such totals* as these, even thqpgh they represent gross values, would have been regarded as fabulous before 1916. The census total of wealth production on farms is $2,500,000,000 for 1889, $4,700,000,000 for 1899, and $8,600,000,000 for 1909, and the estimate for 1915,1 s $10,800,000,000. These numbers, being dollars and not quantities of product,, are the resultant .of two factors, production and price, and hence, as gauges of the productiveness of the agricultural Industry, may be above or below the fact. In the ordinary course of events, many years must have elapsed before the products of farms would reach the stupendous aggregut o gross value of 1917. The average increase per year from 1889 to 1899 was $226,090,000; from 1899 to 1909, $384,000,000; from 1909 to 1915, $370,000,000, and from 1899 to 1915, 16 years, $3’79,000,000. At the average annual rate of increase for the 16 years, not until! 1938 would the gross value of 1917 be reached, computed-as an increase over 1915. Mainly due to increase of price since 1915, the calendar has been anticipated by 21 years. In the continuous annual record, extending back 21 years, 1911 is the only year with a decline in total gross value, of farm products when compared with the preceding year, and that year was one with low production. A year that hardly exceeded the preceding one was 1914, when the price of cotton was demoralized by the war. By the end of 1915 the prices of most farm products were still nearly on the plane of 1914, with crop production 7 per cent above; and the total gross value of farm production was $10,775,000,000, a gain of nearly a billion dollars over either 1913 or 1914. Then followed a rapid ascent of prices of farm products, and the weighted Index for the prices of principal crops in December, 1916, was 56 per cent above 1915, so that, although the crop production was 14 per cent less, the total gross value of farm production was $13,406,000,000, or 25 per cent above 1915, itself the topmost at that time. The performance of 1916 in farm wealth production, unprecedentedly large though it was, was a puny precursor of 1917. The price Index number of the principal crops of this year is 35 per cent above 1916 and 111 per cent above 1915, and complicated with this enormous factor is a crop production that is 12 per cent above 1916. Hence it is that the grand aggregate of $13,611,000,000 is reached as the gross value of the farm crop production of 1917, and of sl9,- i? 444,000,000 as the, total of all production. - Caution is given by the department of agriculture against accepting this total of $19,444,000,000 as the amount of the farmers’ cash income, and also against regarding it as a net income. There are duplication and triplication of value and also Omitted items; qpst of production must be considered, and certainly for 1916 and 1917 a soaring, cost has complicated the problem. It is a gross income in a vague, undefinable, intangible sense, which cannot be reduced to a net income, nor net wealth production, by any process.