Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 December 1905 — SET WORLD’S RECORD. [ARTICLE]

SET WORLD’S RECORD.

AMERICAN FARMS SHOW PARALLELED PROSPERITY. Secretary Wilaon Declare* Cron Yield or 1005 la $0,415,000,000 —Corn Alone Worth Billion—lncrease In Land Value*. The products of the farms of the United States in 1905 reached a value of $G,415,000,000, the highest amount ever reached, according to the annua) report of Secretady Wilson. Besides the enormous yield the Secretary estimates the farms of the country have increased in value during the last five years to a present aggregate of $0,133,000,000. “Every sunset during the last five years,” he says, “has registered an increase of $3,400,000 in the value of the ferms of this country.” In dealing with the crop report “leak,” Secretary Wilson, after referring to the “gross breach of trust on the part of onqof the employes of the bureau of statistics,” says: “This department acted with vigor and dis patch when it got evidence of wrongdoing on the part of its own officials, but we have no evidence of disciplinary or preventive action at the traders’ end of the line, where gamblers, interested neither in the production nor the consumption, disturb values to the injury of both and make loud outcry when creatures of their own kind corrupt officials to betray confidence for the love of money. “The responsibility for this ‘leak’ is shared by every one, who, to get money without work, gamble in farm products. When this form of industry ceases these parasites who tempt department officials will have to work for their bread.” Analyzing the principal crops for the year, the Secretary says that corn reached its highest production with 2,708,000,000 bushels, a gain of 42,000,000 bushels over the next lowest year, 1899. The hay crop is valued at $605,000,000. Cotton, $575,000,000; wheat $525,000,000; oats, $282,000,000; potatoes, $138,000,000; barley, $58,000,000; tobacco, $52,000,000; sugar cane and sugar beets, $50,000,000; rice, $23,892,000; dairy products, $005,000,000, an increase of $54,000,000 over last year. “The farmer’s hen,” the Secretary says, “is becoming a worthy companion to his cow. The annual production of eggs is now a score of billions.” There are more horses and with a larger aggregate value than ever before, notwithstanding, as the Secretary says, they were first threatened by the bicycle and later by the suburban trolley and the automobile. He estimates their value at $1,200,000,000, or nearly as much as the corn crop, and the Value of mules at $252,000,000.

Under the recent amendment to the national banking act allowing the establishment of banks with a capitalization of less than $50,000, there have been 1,754 such banks established in the last year, nearly every one of which is located in a rural community and the capital furnished by farmers, “In the north central States farmers have been depositing money in the banks until the rate of interest on deposits has fallen so low that they have diverted a large portion of their savings to permanent investments,” says the report. “In spite of the fact that the banks do not receive and keep aJI or most of the farmers’ savings, the increase of bank deposits in agricultural States and larger regions is most extraordinary. “The remarkable increases in bank deposits in agricultural States, as well as the increase in the number of small country banks, are directly and indirectly because of the profits that have come to the farmers from the operation of their farms. The man with the hoe has become the man with the harvester and the depositor and shareholder of the bank. “Should there be no relapse from his present position as a wealth producer, three years hence the farmer will find that the farming element, about 35 per cent of the population, has produced an amount of wealth within ten yenrs equnl to one-half of the entire national wealth produced in three centuries.”