The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, August 30, 1917, Page 11

e B Joys of Cordwood Farming Fuel Shipped From Northern Minnesota to Prairie States Spills Rich Profits on Way From Producer to Consumer BY RALPH L. HARMON ILLIONS of acres of cut-over lands and lands covered with small timber are waiting in Northern Minnesota for farm- ers to subdue it and make it produce grain and hay. Scores of big lumber companies and land sharks are trying to induce new settlers to go into this wrecked country and rebuild it along up-to-date agricultural lines, so that it will become a source of wealth and prosperity. Thousands of eastern Montana and North Dakota. farmers are needing the fuel that ought to be taken from these lands. Two or three railroads and a few scores of fuel dealers are standing be- tween these two sets of conditions and getting the profits, which if shared be- tween the cordwood farmers of north- ern Minnesota and the grain farmers of the Dakotas and Montana, would reduce the tangled, brush-covered tim- ber land to productive farms; would furnish the hard-up settlers with money to buy the purebred livestock the bankers insist they should buy; the silos the “letter farming” agents ad- vise them to build; and the rich crops that the land sharks entice them with. On the other hand the prairie farm- ers who are paying coal barons and several sets of middlemen and the transportation agencies big profits, could get fuel for much less money, and in the aggregate millions of dol- lars would be saved annually to these grain states., CORDWOOD FARMERS NOT ARISTOCRATS Perhaps the city dweller or prairie farmer who has to pay $10 a cord for maple or birch, and not less than $8 per cord for the poorest popple or jack pine, think of the cordwood farmers of Northern Minnesota as men who with a few strokes of an ax convert the vir- gin wealth of the forests into coin and hold up the peop’ 3 have no such luxuries as a woou! ot to go to for warmth, Don’t you believe it. Go out into this cordwood country and see for yourself. Go as far as you can in your automo- bile, and when you get where the stumps are too high, and the ruts are too deep, hire some settler with a tough-muscled team and a spring wagon to take you into the heart of the country. By the time you have jolted several miles over rough timber roads all the time imagining how comfortable it would be if you were riding instead on a load of cordwood, with a straw filled sack between you and the splinters, you will have been disabused of one erroneous idea. By the time you have got to the set- tler’'s home and gone with him out over the land, where he is picking up the windrows or ricks of cordwood piece- meal, hauling it with a thin, grass-fed team and an old wagon, you will begin to wonder why men who are getting so rich out of your town or prairie-farm necessities, persist in living in such places and getting along with such equipment. . And if you spent time to go to the homes of a few of them and see how they still have to live in log houses, in spite of lumber kings so vastly wealthy that they can buy legislatures and Consumers pay $255 for a carload of this tamarack wood, while producers get only $82.50, and the men who load it onto the cars get $12 for their hard work, and the use of their teams and wagons. Middlemen get the rest. elect state officials, to help them manufacture lumber more cheaply and get a bizgger profit you would perceive that for some reason the people whose lives are cast among the timber coun- ties are not the ones who are getting rich off cordwood at $10 a cord. But if the conditions among which these cordwood producers live, their homes, their roads, their clothes, did not prove to you how little money they have with which to build better homes and roads, and buy better clothes, just ask them what their profits are on the wood they sell, which you ultimately buy. BIG PROFITS TO HANDLES OF WOOD Every year hundreds of carloads of this wood are hauled by the several railroads out of this timber country to the prairies, sometimes hundreds of miles, and the farmers and townspeo- ple at the other end of the lines pay three to four times what the cordwood farmers get. Somebody else gets the difference. Tamarack is the commonest of the better kinds of wood produced in this timber country. Take tamarack for a starter, The farmer gets $2.76 a cord for this wood that was cut last winter. The consumer (for instance at Fargo, N. D.) pays $8.50, and the difference of $5.25 disappears in the process of getting it from the timber farmer to the consumer. Let's trace a cord from the woods to the wood shed. Before the farmer can get his $2.75 he has to pay a cordwood cutter 80 or 90 cents to cut it. That is the way most of the wood is cut, by the cord. He must then load it onto his wagon, drive five to 10 or 15 miles, hauling from one and one-half to three cords at a trip according to the roads, the number of horses he uses, and the dis- tance, Of course the man who chops down the trees, saws them up into four-foot lengths and splits them with maul and wedge, is not buying Liberty bonds with the surplus funds left over from his work. If he is a tip-top hustler he can cct three cords of popple a day, Working for the cordwood speculators, earning 40 cents per cord by hard Ial_:or versus $1.25 to $1.50 per cord velvet to the specul_ators. These men are loading the wood onto the cars from the long ricks where it seasons, and about one and one-half to two cords of tamarack. Say he cuts two cords of tamarack (more than most of them can) he earns $1.60. But no opulent corporation pays this pitiful sum. The cordwood farmer pays it out of his $2.75 per cord. SPECULATOR TAKES A HANDSOME HANDFUL At the railroad town the farmer sells his load to someone who has learned what a fat chance for exploitation is' here afforded, and who is perfectly willing to buy up this wood with the privilege of laying on a clear profit of $1.25 to $1.50 without any outlay. Sometimes these exploiters do not even pay cash- for the wood, but are mer- chants who have groceries and over- alls to sell, They compel the cord- wood farmer to take out his pay “in trade” at their stores, and if he has more cordwood than he wants grocer- ies, they compel him to accept little credit checks—metal or paper checks stamped from a nickel to a dollar— which he can turn into the store at some future time for goods. Whoever it is, the first middleman who dips into the cordwood deal takes a hand- some handful out of the consumer’s pocket. Then the wood must be hauled 100 to 500 miles to the farmer and city dweller who is to burn it. The rail- roads dip in. They take from $1.25 to $3 a cord (sometimes more) for haul- ing this wood, and then it is turned over to the local dealer, who adds his profit on top of other distribution charges. e, One cord of tamarack brings the farmer at Bagley, Minn, $2.75 per cord green. The wood speculator sells it to the retail dealers in the town for $4.50 on the cars, adding his profit of $1.75, and the second dealer pays some- one to haul it from the piles along the track to the cars, 40 cents a cord. So the dealer gets it for $4.90 on the cars. The railroads figure that one cord of dry tamarack weighs 3500 pounds, and they take a toll of 514 cents per 100 pounds on cordwood from Bagley to - Fargo, or 1$1.92 per cord. Thus the dealer gets; his wood laid down at " Fargo for, $8.82_and he sells it to the consumers for “$3.50,. having a margin ', of $1.68 to pay- for ' his “handling . charge.,” THE “SERVICES” THEY RENDER Let’'s see who get the profits from this cord of wood, and the kind of gervice they render for such profits as they get. The cordwood chopper gets 80 to 90 cents, generally the latter for tamarack, 'The farmer gets $2.75 less the 90 cents, or $1.85, and for this $1.85 he supplies the raw material, “swamps out” paths in the woods, loads it, hauls it five to 15 miles, using half a day to a8 day with himself, and team. The wood speculator takes his profit of $1.76 for no service. The railroad takes $1.92 per cord for hauling it about 140 ‘miles, and the retailer gets $1.68 for taking it off the cars and putting it in the woodshed. 5 On popple wood cut at the same place and s0ld in Fargo the figures are worse: The cordwood cutter gets 80 cents, the farmer 95 cents, (for he sells it at $1.75 at Bagley) the speculator puts it on the cars for $3.25, thus add-- ing his-profit of $1.50, and the wood . " PAGE ELEVEN dealer gets it on the cars for $3.65, after paying the 40 cents -loading charge. Popple is much lighter than tamarack, weighing dry, according to railroad figures, 2500 pounds, so that the freight is only $1.87, and the wood lands at the dealer’s town, costing him $5.02. But the consumer pays $8, which gives the last dealer a margin of $2.98 to pay for taking it off of the cars and putting it in the woodshed. On birch the farmer gets $4 per cord, the speculator takes a profit of $1.26 and the railroad gets $1.65 for hauling it. The final dealer thus has his birch wood delivered to him in Fargo at $7.30 per cord, but for wood of this class he gets $10 .a cord, so that his margin for “handling” is $2.70. FRODUCERS GET $82.50 CONSUMERS PAY $255 Also the farmer has to pay more to get that kind of wood cut, $1 a cord instead of 80 cents, so his share is really only $3; while the cordwood cut- ter is a husky man if he can make more than $1.50 a day in wages, cut- ting birch or maple. The Fargo dealers are no different from others. The fuel dealers all over the Northwest who draw their wood supplies from northern Minnesota for sale to consumers in the prairie states. add similar profits. The main differ= ence is that the consumers farther away pay more, and the railroads get more, the charge for freight alone to points along the Montana-North Da- kota line running upward of $3 a cord, and there is lots of Minnesota wood sold at those points, as well as lots of eastern coal on which other profits are made, On one carload of tamarack, 80 cords, the proceeds are distributed thus: The woodsmen get $27 for cut- ting it; the farmer who furnishes it end hauls it to town, gets $55.60; the wood speculator gets $27.50 for doing nothing; the railroad gets:' $57.60 for hauling it, and the last dealer gets $50.40, most of which is profit. Out of the whole $255 which the consumers pay for this carload of wood, the pro- ducers get a total of only $82.60 while the other handlers get $192.50. ki This may explain to the prairie farm= ers and the townspeople why they pay 80 much for fuel; and it ought to ex- plain to the real estate men, the state immigration : departments, -and --the better farming boosters why the, de- vasted timber lands of mnorthern Minnesota have not .been converted into the thriving farms which the pub- Ho generally is led to believe they would be, if homeseekers would; do their duty and just settle in this.in- viting country, where they would get paid for clearing their own land, and prosperity would overwhelm them if they would only grab their oppor=- tunities. s - . WILL BE HEARD Fort Williams, Colo., Aug., 1917, Editor Nonpartisan Leader: I take it our new congressman—Con- gressman John' M. Baer of North Da- kota—will make ‘himself ' heard ‘and known at the first favorable oppor- tunity. = Let us of Colorado, and: the rest of the Northwest know from week to week how the “yeast” is working in our own, as well as in all the other states, where the work in going fore ward. R. O. TENNEY,