Farmers usually had to borrow money to purchase equipment and sometimes they over-indulged. "I know one or two that did," said Joseph Beard.
When you have several thousand dollars invested in machinery, and you only use it three, five, ten, fifteen days a year, the rest of the time it's sitting idle ... it would have been ... better if they had hired their work done from someone else rather than put that much into it.[196]
More cash was needed to buy manufactured goods as the farm became less self-supporting, but prices for raw materials remained low during the agricultural slump of the 1920s and 1930s. "Agriculture was much less distressed when the farm was a self-supporting home," reflected the Washington Star:
But when factories began producing commodities in quantity the farmer could buy them easier than he could make them at home.
At first glance this looks like an admirable situation. But the hitch arose when the farmer found himself unable to maintain a fair basis of exchange.[197]
The result was that many farms of long-standing ownership had to be mortgaged. In the space of one year (between 1924 and 1925) county mortgages rose a dramatic 30% and by 1940 they had risen another 20%.[198] Worse yet, a small but significant number of farmers and farm laborers were beginning to leave the countryside altogether to work in the city.
The Kidwell farm and Floris vicinity shown in an aerial photograph taken in 1937. Photo, National Archives and Records Service.
The county's improved transportation system was partially responsible for this. Access to markets had been facilitated by surfaced roads but an easy avenue to city jobs was also opened. Short and regular hours, higher pay and city amenities were strong attractions to the farmer who had had to work "from daybreak to backbreak" for a scanty living.[199] In recognition of this problem, Derr wrote plaintively in his annual report of 1925: