The question of selling farm products, or rather the problem of selling them at the right time, is one of vast importance to farmers. Every farmer ought to study carefully and intelligently, not only the current market reports, but the reports and statistics of the food products of the world—their probable supply, their probable demand. He should know when to sell, and he should have a place in which to store his grain until the right time to sell it comes. Kansas is to-day the most prosperous state in the Union. I make this statement deliberately, and am confident that statistical and census reports will sustain it. But Kansas would be far more prosperous if the barns of her farmers were as creditable to Kansas agriculture as our school houses are to Kansas intelligence. Kansas will never be as prosperous as the State ought to be, until every prairie slope within her borders is adorned with a Pennsylvania barn. You all know what a Pennsylvania barn is, I suppose. I mean one of the great double-decker barns, built on the side of a hill, the first story capacious enough to stable all the horses and cattle belonging on a section of land; the second story—on a level with the ground on the upper side—vast enough to take in all the hay and grain of the farm, and furnish, also, storage room for all its vehicles and implements. A noble barn is the old Keystone double-decker, and the Kansas farmer who has one of them is fully armed and equipped, not only against the elements, but against the “bears” of the grain markets. Forehanded, and with such a barn, he can wait until he gets his price for his grain or his stock. He is not compelled to accept the prices fixed by the gamblers in options. With such barns scattered all over the prairies of Kansas, the Kansas farmers would rule the markets, would make the price of their own products.
Another thing the farmers of Kansas want to pay greater attention to, is road-making. Years ago, when the farms were scattered, and the roads ran along the divides, we had, without cost or labor, the best natural highways on the continent. But the occupancy of the country, and the fences or the herd law, have diverted the roads to the section lines, and, as a result, our highways are generally execrable. The losses entailed upon the farmers of Kansas, growing out of these wretched roads, are enormous. They foot up in a dozen different directions—in loss of valuable time, in injury of horses, in breakage of vehicles, in destruction of harness, in a multiplication of trips, and in many other ways. Above all other men, the farmers of Kansas require good roads. Increased tax levies for public highways, and an intelligent expenditure of these levies, is one of the great needs of Kansas. A marked decrease of the prevalent Kansas mania for new railroads, and an equally marked increase of public interest in the construction of decent country roads, would be a wholesome reform of incalculable advantage to the farmers of Kansas. The law most needed in this State is a good road law—an act that will put the building or repairing of our public highways under competent direction, and furnish ample means for such work, and thus give to Kansas a system of durable roads, macadamized wherever the ground is soggy, and with solid stone culverts or bridges wherever these are necessary.
The four questions I have thus discussed—the pecuniary value of home adornments, the exposure of farm implements to the mercy of the elements, the importance of commodious barns, and the necessity of improved roads—are of direct personal and practical interest to every Kansas farmer. And what interests the farmers of Kansas, must be of moment to every citizen. For Kansas is an agricultural country. The prosperity of this State is based upon its farm products. Our mineral resources are, in comparison with our agricultural productions, small and unimportant. We have some lead in the southeast; we have coal in many sections, and the supply is equal to the wants of our people; we have salt and gypsum in abundance. But the wealth of Kansas lies in our harvest fields. Our prosperity is based, primarily, upon the plow. Kansas embraces over fifty-two million acres of land. Fully fifty million acres of this vast area of country is capable of producing luxuriant crops. Only a little over thirteen million acres—less than one-fourth of the entire area—is now under cultivation, and the land classed as “under cultivation” includes nearly five million acres of prairie grass. Practically, therefore, only about seven million acres of Kansas soil have been touched by the plow. Yet the products this year will aggregate fully ten million bushels of wheat, two hundred million bushels of corn, six million bushels of rye, three million bushels of oats, and seven million bushels of Irish potatoes—making two hundred and twenty-six million bushels of these five crops.
It is not possible, as yet, to estimate the value of the field crops of Kansas, including grasses, for the year 1885; but their value for the previous year aggregated $104,945,773.
Kansas had last year 5,444,391 head of stock, valued at $115,645,050.
We have planted nearly twenty-two million fruit trees, and have over one hundred and thirty thousand acres of artificial forest trees.
The assessed valuation of the property of the State, for the year 1885, aggregates $248,820,262, an increase over last year of $11,806,505. The real estate aggregates in value $123,000,000, an increase of nearly six millions over the valuation of last year. The railroad property of the State is valued at $30,367,820, an increase of $1,911,912; and we have 4,180 miles of completed railway within our borders.
This is all the growth of thirty years. I could, perhaps, more accurately say of twenty years; for Kansas hardly began to grow until the spring of 1865, when the home-returning soldiers and the railroads came together. The development of Kansas during these two decades challenges comparison with that of any country in the world. An irresistible impulse seems to have brought hither the best blood and brain of all the nations of the world. Our schools, colleges, universities and churches rival those of the oldest countries, and railways, traversing nearly every organized county, bring a market to every farmer’s granary.
It is asked now and then, Can this wonderful growth continue? Why should it not continue? Less than one-fourth of the entire area of Kansas, as I have stated, is under cultivation; there are millions of acres yet unoccupied; the immigration to Kansas this year is unprecedented; and the human energy which is assembling here with such unprecedented rapidity, must produce results even more remarkable than those wrought during the past two decades. The development of the present is only the dawn of that which is to be. The Kansas of to-day only foreshadows the Kansas of the future.
I make this statement with a full realization of its meaning. I know there are many, even of our own people, who believe that a very large section of the western third of our State can never be successfully tilled. But actual experiment is shattering this theory. The line marking the western boundary of agricultural productiveness is a myth. It goes westward with the settlements. The rain-belt travels with the plow. It has been located on half a dozen degrees of longitude. It was on the Blue river when I came to the State, nearly thirty years ago. The valleys of the Republican, the Arkansas and the Solomon were then regarded as rainless deserts. But the line moved westward, year by year, until it reached the hundredth meridian. Beyond this, by almost universal assent, it was declared that successful farming was not possible. Yet in the northern tier, three counties lying west of that line, and running through to Colorado, are teeming with a busy and aggressive population; and these people point to crops of wheat and corn equaling any ever grown elsewhere, as the most convincing answer that can be made to the assertion that western Kansas is sterile and rainless. On the far southwestern line the development and the harvests produced are equally astonishing and convincing. The same wide and beautiful valleys, the same rich uplands, the same deep and productive soil, the same luxuriant vegetation, are the characteristics of these far-western counties, as they are of the counties watered by the Delaware, the Kansas, and the Neosho; and the same blue sky and pure air bends over and envelops the whole of this great State of ours, from the Missouri to the Colorado line.