Exactly 100 years ago

Adam Kuznia, a Minnesota farmer, has started writing on Substack. He’s carrying on a clever campaign to get a proper Agriculture subject category on Substack, so people who want to know about farming or write about farming can find it easily.

Henry Wallace, father and son, fought the same battle on a larger scale to get the country and government to PAY ATTENTION to farmers.

Henry Wallace Junior served as sec of ag under FDR, and did everything government could do to solve the Dust Bowl and other problems of farmers. Why did he understand the problems so well? Partly because his father had been sec of ag under Harding and tried to help the farmers get through the period that CAUSED the Dust Bowl.

Exactly 100 years ago, in December 1924, Henry Junior edited and published his father’s book Our Debt and Duty to the Farmer. Henry Senior detailed the postwar depression of 1920 along with the response by the Wall Street monsters who were starting their decade-long blitzkrieg. The bombing ultimately destroyed the whole country, not just the farmers. FDR and Henry Junior had to solve the problems left by the all-consuming financial terrorists.

Henry Senior described the attitude of the bankers and Tech Tyrants of 1920:

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Another large group whose experiences have been confined to city and industrial life, and who find it difficult to understand why there has been so much talk about the farmer and his troubles, looks at the matter differently. They cannot see that the farmer has any more reason to complain than the manufacturer or storekeeper, or any other businessman who is having a hard time financially. They regard the difficulties of the farmers as temporary, as the natural outgrowth of war conditions at home and abroad, or as due to the lack of business judgment of the farmer himself.

They say: “These difficulties must be overcome by the free operation of that good old law of supply and demand. If prices are too low because farmers are producing too much, cut down production or produce something else. Economize. Apply business methods to farming. Watch us and do as we do. If you need more money for a time, we will lend it to you, provided you can give us strictly first-class security. Sell your automobile and stay at home and work harder. Hang on. You will come out all right.”

= = = = = END QUOTE.

Henry, a real farmer before he was a writer or official, understood that producing something else was physically impossible. The iron law of killer “economics” says that all products are substitutes. If wheat isn’t profitable, switch to rice. If you can’t make money growing cattle, switch to coffee. Such changes are possible but not easy in a factory, and they’re instantly easy for a banker. If you’re not making enough billions by destroying the beef market, start destroying the coffee market. One mouse click, another market destroyed and another trillion for me!

Soil and climate forbid such substitutions in farming. And farmers couldn’t work harder. They couldn’t order their factory to run double shifts for a while, or use more AI time. Farmers always run double shifts. And the result of all that lending was the Dust Bowl, which Henry Junior handled.

Trends in various commodities:

Note the different patterns. As in the 1930s, some occupations were especially hard hit and some didn’t suffer as much.

The bankruptcies reflect the same difference in crops, which are UNSUBSTITUTABLE.

The crop failures of the 1930s followed a different pattern because the Dust Bowl was more purely natural and geographical than the economic war of the 20s. Drought was common in the Plains, while other areas had floods which damaged cities more than farms. The non-ag industries of the Plains, like oil, weren’t bothered by the drought, so the oil areas of Oklahoma didn’t suffer as much.

When Henry Junior ran for president in 1948 he was trying to solve another postwar crisis with the same cost/wage imbalance caused by the same Men Of Monopoly. And we’re in the same kind of crisis right now after Trump’s all-consuming “virus” torture and genocide, supervised and profited by the same Men Of Monopoly.

Henry Senior listed the causes of the 1920 depression:

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Chief among them was the wartime stimulus to production, which eventually brought about an oversupply of farm products and a rapid decline in farm prices. Another influence was a credit policy that first inflated prices and then contributed to their deflation. Still another cause was the uneven character of the price decline, which brought about a distorted relationship between the prices of the things the farmer has to sell and the things he has to buy.

= = = = = END QUOTE.

Bankers love to create such imbalances for the peasants. When peasants have to pay twice what they should for housing and food while earning less than before, bankers win both ways.