Did Deflation Ruin the Farmer and Would Inflation Save Him?

Abstract

The recent marked improvement in the agricultural situation has led many persons to assume that the pressing problems of the individual farmer, as well as questions of national agricultural policy, have by some miraculous process solved themselves and that discussions of the ills of the farmer and remedies therefor are now mere objects of historical interest or academic speculation. Many of us, however, who are concerned with the permanent well-being of agriculture, while we grant that some progress has been made during these sadder and wiser days since 1920, look upon the present relatively good fortune of the farming class as having been achieved to a considerable degree at the expense of Europeans, Argentines, and other foreign competitors in the world markets who have been the victims of unfavorable crop conditions. Furthermore, this increased well-being among American farmers is by no means universal, as a survey of certain corn, dairy and livestock producing sections will readily show. The first half of my topic, viz., Did deflation ruin the farmer ? lends itself to widely varying interpretations. That farm products underwent a radical price deflation and that agriculturists as a class suffered more severely than any other group seems scarcely open to argument. Consequently, I would be presuming upon your patience if I addressed myself to the details of that deflation. A strictly literal interpretation of this first query in the title might just as logically confine one also to the question as to whether the farming class could truly be said to have been ruined by the deflation. But here again the facts are too patent to warrant serious difference of opinion, for it is universally conceded that a quite appalling number of individual farmers, especially in the newer sections of the country, were completely ruined as a result of the price debacle. With your permission, then, I am going to adopt a rather free interpretation of this part of my title and shall assume that it reads: Did the individuals