AGRICULTURAL & PASTORAL

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 178, 6 July 1871, Page 6

AGRICULTURAL & PASTORAL

A FEW WOEDS ON FA^MITO

Quite often a green youth undertakes to get rich by farming near some .great city. He has heard and believes that cabbages bring from sdol. to Bdoi. and even lOdol. per hundred ; squashes from lOdol. to 25d015. per hundred;-water-melons from 20 dol. to SOdoL, and soon. He has made his calculations on this basis, and sanguin'ely expects to make money rapidly. But his products;^ ia the first place, fall-short of his estimates; they are not ready for market so soon as he expected they would be ; and when at length they are ready, everyone else seems to have rushed in ahead of him. The market is glutted ; no one seems to want his " truck "at any figure ; he sells it for a song, and quits farming, disgusted and bankrupt. May be, His stuff would have sold much better nesct week or. the week after; but he cduld not afford to bring it to market and take it back day after, day, on the chance tiat the demand for it would improve by-and-by. I judge that more young jnen have on this account turned their backs on farming, after a brief trial, than on any other. .They might have borne. up agaiust the shortness of their crops, hoping for better luck next time ; but the necessity of selling them fora price which wouldnot have reimbursed, their cost, had they been ever so luxuriant, utterly disheartens and alienates them. I preach no crusade against hucksters and middle-men. I bold them, in the ; actual state of things, benefactors to | both producers and consumers. In so far as they d( al honestly and meet their obligations, they deserve commendation rather than reproach. What .1 urge is that more economical and efficient machinery of exchange and distribution ought to be devised and set at work — machinery that would do all that is required at a moderate reasonrble cost. I would like to see one of our solvent, well-managed railroads advertise that it would henceforth buy at any of its stations all the farmers' produce that might be offered at the highest price that the state of the markets would justify. Let its agents purchase whatever came along — a basket of eggs, a coop of chickens, a barrel of apples, a sack of beans, a pail of currants — any thing that could be sold in the city to which it runs, and which would conduce to human sustenance or comfort. Its object should be freight — the rapid and vast increase of its transportation, not extra profit on. the articles tr nsported. Bnt let its agents be ready to buy at fair prices whatever was offered, paving cash down, and pushing everything purchased directly into the market, so as to have the money back to buy more with directly. The Railroad Company, thus, owning nearly everything edible ifc brought into market, would buy and sell at uniform prices, and not bid against itself, as a crowd of hucksters aud middlemen will often do. I am confident that a railroad that would inaugurate this system on a right basis, saying to every farmer living near it, " Grow whatever your soil is best adapted to, and bring it to our station j there you shall have cash down for it, at the highest price we can afford to give," would rapidly double and quadruple its freights, and would thus build up a transportation business which has; no parallel under the present system, — Horace Greeley in "New York Tribune."