The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, April 19, 1920, Page 4

for you to go back home and help to ed- ucate the farmers to accept the grades as they are now?” Mr. Meredith asked. Holmberg indicated that he thought it would be all right to do this instead of giving the farmers the revision that they demanded. Throughout the hearing Secretary Mer- edith exhibited apparent lack of knowl- edge as to how grain sales actually were handled. He asked time after time this question of the farmers: “If the require- ments for No. 1 grade are revised down- ward, isn’t it a fact that you will not get any better than No. 2 price for it?” while millers were asked, “If the re- quirements are lowered and the price also is lowered, won’t you get No. 1 wheat at a No. 2 price?” He appeared to think that the farmers sold their grain directly to the mills, ap- parently not knowing that the grain pass- ed through the hands of many men be- fore it reached the millers. E. E. Bossemeyer, a grain dealer of Superior, Neb., let the cat out of the bag when he said: “The grain dealers will see to it that the millers don’t get any better wheat than the grade requires. When we get some 60-pound wheat we will add some b55-pound wheat with it to make the whole lot grade No. 1 and keep it all down to 58 pounds, or whatever the test wheat is fixed.” WHEAT GROWERS CHARGED WITH “SLOPPY FARMING” A representative of tiac $pring Wheat Crop Im- provement association said that the claim that the farmers would not put in a large wheat crop if the grades were not changed was untrue. He said that he had been making a series of investigations and had found that the North Dakota crop would be de- creased only 8 per cent from last year, the Minne- sota crop 9 per cent and the South Dakota crop 19 per cent, and intimated that the farmers had gone so far along in their plans for the 1920 crop that they could not stop now and that there was no use doing anything for them. Revising the grades, he said, would tend to increase careless farming. A. L. Goetzman, a miller of La Crosse, Wis., also told Mr. Meredith that the farmers in the Northwest were doing “sloppy farming” and that the department of agriculture should not do any- thing to revise the grades. Both this miller and the Crop Improvement association representative were applauded by the assembled millers and grain deal- ers, as were all other speakers who made deroga- tory references to the farmers. Many of the mill- grades. The principal changes proposed in the presen_t spring and durum wheat grades considered at the Chi- cago conference were as follows: That the test weight of hard red spring wheat be reduced one pound for each grade, making 57-pound wheat No. 1, ete. That No. 1 spring be allowed to carry 5 per cent of durum and all durum grades be allowed to carry 10 per cent of spring wheat. ‘That all spring and durum grades be allowed to carry 15 per cent of moisture. That 1 per cent of rye be allowed in all spring and . durum grades, in addition to present foreign material. That humpback be substituted as a subclass for “red spring” wheat. That instead of requiring that No. 1 hard red spring and durum wheats be “bright” in color, that the wheat shall be of “good color.” Ninety days’ notice is required of a change in Whatever changes are decided upon by Sec- retary of Agriculture Meredith probably will be an- nounced by May 1. ers, however, professed to be speaking for the farm- ers. They said it was for the farmers’ best inter- ests to keep the requirements as high as possible. It was not until late in the afternoon session that the farmers had their real innings, when John N. Hagan, secretary of agriculture and labor of North Dakota, got the floor. Mr. Hagan said: “Mr. Secretary, I am sorry this meeting was held outside of the spring wheat district and with so little notice. In the spring wheat district the farm- ers would have attended and you would have got- ten their viewpoint and the millers could have easily driven over in \their 12-cylinder cars. “The millers at this meeting have claimed, one after another, that they were speaking for the best interest of the farmers. I am inclined to doubt this. As a farmer I am certain that I am not quite unselfish enough to look after by opponent’s inter- ests quite as well as my own at a meeting of this kind. “Most of the talk has been about weights. The fact is that the quality of the wheat depends pri- marily upon the gluten content. When you try to raise the quality of wheat by legislation as the de- partment of agriculture has done in the past, in- creasing the requirements to make a given grade, you don’t do it. The wheat that is produced de- pends upon soil, moisture and other climatic con- ditions out of control of the department of agri- culture or farmers.” A hot wind often comes along in the summer and stops the growth but does not destroy the gluten content. “In 1916, when, as a Minnesota dele- gate pointed out, spring wheat averaged only 51 pounds, the Pillsbury milling peo- ple put out a letter to their trade that on account of the high gluten content they had better flour than usual. “Here is a statement that I will make and challenge any miller here to contra- dict it: Although the millers have stated that they must have a high test wheat to make flour, in North Dakota the mill- ers are grinding 40 per cent southern winter wheat with our hard spring wheat. “Let me repeat again that you can’t get an expression from the farmers’ side of this case unless you hold a meeting in their territory. 1In spite of the state- ment that has been made that wheat acreage is only going to be reduced 8 per cent I know that it is going to be re- duced more than that. The farmers can not get the labor they need and they can’t compete with the manufacturer and miller in bidding for that labor. “This country needs more food produc- tion. The tenant farming situation is growing worse. It is no good to preach ‘back to the land.’ Conditions have got to be made so that farming shall be made more profitable. FARMERS PENALIZED FOR FOLLOWING EXPERT ADVICE “One of the changes proposed in the federal grades is to allow 1 per cent more of rye. The department of agriculture and the agricultural col- leges have been teaching us to rotate crops. The number of crops that we can use in North Dakota is small and rye is one of them. When wheat is planted after rye we can not prevent a volunteer crop of rye. We are penalized for having practic- ed the very crop rotation that the department of agriculture has been preaching whenever we have more than 1 per cent of rye with the wheat. At the same time the department of agriculture’s fig- ures shoy that as much as 3 per cent rye can be ground along with the wheat without affecting the quality of the flour in any way.” P. D. McMillan, representing the Washburn- Crosby Milling company of Minneapolis, was chal- lenged by Mr. Hagan to state to what extent rye was mixed with wheat in the Washburn-Crosby mills. Mr. McMillan admitted that his company employed chemists and other technical experts but (Continued on page 14) THE TIDE IS TURNING—CAN THEY STOP IT? AN \ "%.J Ld \ Ve X ) 4 SN \PARTISARIS PAGE FOUR % e N Wty ENTIMENT 1 NS S R = —Drawn expressly for the Leader by W. C. Morris. + -