The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, May 27, 1918, Page 13

s < v ‘i X Sl o Y ol Rl T~ ‘hold on all the little business. ARE STACKED - began. " The Farmers Play Another Man’s Game Graln Dealers Steal Millions by Control of Gradlng, Docking and Weighing 4 _of Wheatn—Pubhc Lontrol Will Bring Justice ISN'T THE _SPRING QIR DELIGHTFUL! | ALWAYS GET THE SHORT END OF THE STICK AND HE says IT 1S DISLOYAL TO TeELL ANYBODY ABOUT IT!® GREAT system of middlemen and nonproducers has planted itself on the backs of the farm- ers. By preventing the pro- ducers from trading direct with the consumers and monopoliz- ing supply and demand this closed market is able to fix prices and get away with $66 out of every $100 the consumer pays for the farm- ers’ produce. If the farmer could realize how this system robs him and how much it robs him in each particular case he would be stung into immediate combined action with his fellows to remedy the evil. This closed market system is composed of market- ing, transportation, trade, manufacturing .and banking monopohes. It includes practically all the big business in the United States and has a strangle The Pujo congess- sional committee investigated it in 1913 and found that even then it controlled twenty-seven billion dollars worth of wealth. It has more than doubled . its holdings since the war began. - 'The food trust is one of the infant prodlgxes of * this unsavory brood. The grain dealing and éleva- tor interests are closely assoclated with the food trust. In this field the pressing necessities of the gram growers compel them to sell quickly at a low price. The general poverty of the population which sub- sists largely on bread compels it to buy quickly at a high price. Bread is the main necessity of over half the population of the civilized world and of the poorest half at that. Here is an opportunity to fix prices to cause Shylock to smack his lips in envy. THE CARDS } SR C. S. Vrooman, assistant secretary of agriculture, made an investigation of wheat prices after the war He reported:- “I found when wheat was selling ‘2t $3.40 a bushel in the Chicago grain pit, the farmer, who produced it, was getting only $1.356 a bushel.” This profit of $2.05 a bushel for buying wheat and gettlng it as far along toward the consumers as ' the grain pit, represents the ability of the system to hold up farmer and consumer by fixing pnces by monopolizing supply and demand. But this is only the beginning. The farmer still has a little " money-left that must be taken by a system of sneak thievery. Through the system’s control of finishing, market- ing, transportatlon, laws and press, the farmer finds \ - system of grading and sold to * proved that _correspondingly. himself in a game where the other fellew makes . all the rules. When the farmer turns up an ace ~ the ‘other fellow says, “I rule that a deuce takes an ace,” and sure enough, " it does. When the farmer takes his wheat to the market this kind of game com- mences. , THE GRADING STEAL ENORMOUS The other fellow says, “] weigh the grain and tell you what it weighs,” and he weighs 1t. And he says, “I de- cide how much it shall be docked,” and it is so. And he says, “I'll do all the grading,” and the farmerhumbly acquiesces. Dr. E. F. Ladd of the Agricultural college of North Dakota, in a series of bulletins resulting from an investigation he made in 1916, estimates that in one year the . farmers of North Dako- ta alone lost in the three items of weighing, dock- ing and grading more than $50,000,000. The closed market system is more than a mere monopoly and price-fixing brace game. It is a sys- tem that has established control of every form of transaction with the farmer and through this con- trol it makes the rules of the game and picks the farmer’s pockets after it has held him up. It du- plicates its thieving tricks of underweighing, dock- ing and false grading by controlling the game in practxca.lly every product the farmer attempts to sell. MUTUAL CONTROL THE REMEDY Public control is the only permanent and desirable rem- edy. The public, representing the rights of everybody, is the only agency capable of getting justice for everybody in market control, price-fixing and the transactions that lie between the producers and consumers. Everybody should be repre- . sented in. these things. We don’t want a farmers’ monop- oly of these things any more than we want a middlemen’s monopoly of them. Concerning the biggest of these items, grading, Doctor Ladd says: “Wheat would ap- pear to be bought from the farmer by one set of rules or the terminal elevator by an entirely different system of grading.” How this works out was shown by the investigation of the Minnesota legislature. It .elevators = are regular hatcheries for chang- ing low grades of wheat into high grades. Following is the record- of one elevator for a period of 12 months. Simply by passing the wheat through the elevator the high- est priced wheat was increased by 658,871 bushels and the sec- ond highest priced wheat by 6,830,603 ' bushels, while the low grades of wheat decreased: If the farm- ers owned elevators that would change low priced wheat inta oly, who says: ™ for taking it.” PAGE TBIR’I'EEN : No Friend of Ours Introducing Mr. Predatory Monop- “The plain people denounce me as a grinding monopolist, while really I am nothing more than a stream of their own money which they insist in pour- ing upon me in the form of indirect taxation or silly marketing conditions. The plain people who do not know how to vote simply force their money into my pockets, and then they criticize me high priced wheat.they soon would all be wealthy. % . Bushels Bushels \Grade v N Received Shipped Out No. 1 Hard.......... 341,687...... .. 1,000,438 No. 1 Northemn....... 10,070,414........16,900,917 No. 2 Northern....... 7,341,694...... .. 5,978,311 No. 8 Spring......... 1,335,830..... ees 444,041 Rejected ............ 256,063..... ees 134471 No Grade ........ wes 1,335,631, .0..00 . 344,823 30,680,999, 22,803,001 Amount on hand .. it seie . 7,877,998 30,680,999 BIG PROFITS IN LOW.GRADES Doctor Ladd points out that the local elevators used four grades of wheat not found in the official grading: “a,” “b,” “c,” “d,” feed wheat. The grain dealers gave these’grades the name of feed wheat to give the impression that they can not be milled but are only good for stock feed. Doctor Ladd proved later by actual tests that even the lowest grade, feed “d” wheat, makes good flour. In Bulletin 119 he shows the following percent- ages of gain to the flour mill interests of the vari- ous grades of wheat: No. 1 Northern, 21.4 per cent; No. 2 Northern, 27.5 per cent; No. 3 North- ern, 26.8 per cent; No. 4 Northern, 41.1 per cent; Feed A, 57.5 per cent; Feed B, 78.2; Feed C, 92.8; Feed D, 119.9 per cent profit. ' Now comes the trick called dockage. Dockage consists in penalizing the farmer for substances in his grain that are afterwards extracted and sold by the dealers at a profit. Doctor Ladd has esti- mated that the farmers of North Dakota alone on a hundred million bushel crop have lost $2,394,000 as dockage on screenings. He shows that on such a crop the millers make on screenings and other by-products the following: Screenings ...... 119,700 toms....worth $2,394,000 Bran ..:cees e....381,300 tons....worth 7,626,000 Shorts ..ceeee... .worth 9,999,000 .454,660 toms... 955,560 $20,019,000 The total cost of manufacturing 4.55 bushels of wheat into a barrel of flour, including milling ex- pense, labor, insurance, taxes, depreciation, repairs, renewals, office, overhead, selling and general expenses, sacks, bar- rels, ete., is 80 cents. The 99 pounds of bran and shorts and the eight pounds of screenings that come from:' this 4.55 bush- .. els of wheat is worth $1.78. Hence, the by-products com- ing from the manufacture of a barrel of flour pay the manu- + facturing cost twice over and with 18 cents to spare. JERRY’S BOOK Freeman, S. D. Editor Nonpartisan Leader: When I received the book from Jerry Bacon, entitled “The Farmer and Townley- ism,” I thought it was a Sears & Roebuck catalog. After reading a few pages I found the goods still cheaper, so I said to my wife: “Goods at such low figures in war times must be rotten on the inside.” Poor Jerry is struggling for life. AIll he has left is 2,100 acres of land and that paper, the Grand Forks Herald. And yet he is having a very hard time to get the people in North Dakota to believe that he is really a farmer. “Poor Jerry.” We will answer your rotten Jerry Juice, and cheap Bacon bunk at the election ,next November. The League is doing fine in Hutch- inson county, S. D. The Leader is one of the most interesting papers in our homes. T. H. KIRSCHENMAN.