The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, May 24, 1917, Page 10

e e | | | i { | | < usiness Flax Offers a Chance for Profit S S BY H. L. BOLLEY HEN the American farmer finds that a crop no longer pays him for the cost of ‘growing and a reasonable margin, he discontinues that crop. It makes slight difference whether this failure is due to weather, disease, bad marketing or bad dis- tribution, or to a faulty, tariff regula- tion, he quits and takes up some other crop. Farmers in this country are in- dividualists and have not learned to co-operate even in as active a sense as the Russian - peasants. However much it may be desirable as a crop, it is difficult to lead a lot of independ- ent farmers who have, been in the habit of growing a crop because it paid them, to continue at a crop which fails to pay. There has been an attempt to sow the largest number of acres of the new lands as they are broken, to flax, with- out regard to the kind or quality of seed that has gone into the land. As- sociated with this has been a peculiar marketing condition whereby -if the farmers happened to raise a compara- tively large crop, then the price fell to such low level that growers who hap- pened to have to sell his seed as soon as it was threshed to pay labor, etc., have always had to sell below costs. This drove all that class of people out of the business every time there came such a depression. Only the abler, more wealthy farmers having avail- able machinery and high priced seed could .jump into the game again after they once quit. WHY SOME FARMERS GIVE UP FLAX Disease and lack of knowledge of soil and seed sanitation brought on the idea that flax was hard on land and caused many to give it up because they thought it was a destructive crop. Then there was a worse disease than this known as the so called ‘“chamber of commerce” or so called “board of trade,” which institutions harbor and are supported by market manipulators and speculators. These men deal in imaginary grain—sometimes the price is up and sometimes it is down, but when these imaginative business men think there is a large crop in sight, they bring about by their bidding against each other a price which causes all those fellows who must sell their grain at the time of threshing to sell it on a losing market. This de- stroys the “goose which Ilays the golden egg'” so far as the paint manu- facturing industry and the consumers of paint and varnish products are con- cerned, just as surely as it destroys the hope of the farmer who starts in to own a piece of land and to earn a home by growing flax. S =S S This is a department of the Leader devoted to news, facts, information and opinions of interest to farmers as farmers and as business men, =TT It Is a Good Crop on Old or New Land A flax field in Montana, where this crop a good flax state. FLAX ACREAGE FALLS ONE MILLION ACRES These and other conditions are in my opinion the chief reasons why the flax acreages have become less and less every year in the United States until during the last three years they have fallen off over one million of acres. Under our campaign for better flax cropping there has been a continual increase in the amount that the farm- ers are raising per acre. Then again we have learned how to grow flax on old land by breeding varieties which can resist the diseases, so that many farmers in eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota are raising fully as many bushels per acre on old land as they once raised on new land, but here they meet with excess of weeds and many other conditions which tend to discourage them, so that the going back of the flax crop on to lands where it has once grown well will have to be a slow process. Flax can come back on to the old lands where it has been before but it can not be expected to come back on to land where the farm- ers have gone into stock raising,— corn, alfalfa, clover, etc. For such farmers can make more money under those conditions than they can off from any grain crop, and flax has Breaking sod in North Dakota with a tractor and ten hottoms for the planting of flax. Both the oil-producing seed, and the straw are valuable crops in the Northwest. T e is frequently used to subdue new prairie seldom shown that it can excel -in money making. CAN GROW FLAX WELL ON OLD LAND It will be possible for it to go back on to the old lands of Minnesota and Wisconsin and the Dakotas, if the market conditions warrant it. At the present time no one needs to encourage the growth of flax much more than the market price indicates, but “will the market hold if the crop comes? Every bit of flax will be seeded that the farmers can succeed in handling. They will probably, this year, put in every acre that they can afford seed for, get * plowed with the labor available and the machinery available. The price is satisfactory to them. 1If, however, they succeed in raising a rather good crop and the price should suddenly tumble out just because those who are speculating in it think or imagine that there is an enprmous supply in the country, then &again the farmer will forget to grow it and hold a long memory of it. Therefore, I appeal to the business organizations whose industry rests on cropping to aid in stabilizing market- ing and distributing conditions on which the farming industry rests. This should be not only for their own good, but for the good of the public, and (Continued on Page 14) ADVERTISEMENT : than any competitor. 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