"The growing farm prosperity in Minnesota above noted finds its highest development in the past five years, during which the selling price of wheat in London has averaged approximately one dollar per bushel, or the amount called for by the conditions stated by Mr. Atkinson. This increasing farm prosperity in Minnesota, which lessens the mortgage foreclosures of the exclusive wheat growers forty per cent in thirty years, has been the main factor in the settlement of Minnesota and the two Dakotas. It has caused the wheat grown in the territory of these three States to increase from 10,000,000 bushels in 1867 to 190,000,000 bushels in 1898. With no added profit in the business, the settlement of the vacant lands of these States and those of Montana and of the British Northwest will move on, and twenty-five years from now will find in the territory tributary to Minneapolis and Duluth not less than 400,000,000 bushels of wheat raised annually. Even then but a fraction of the possible wheat lands of the great Northwest will be under the plow. If a material increase should take place in the present average profits of the Northwestern wheat grower, the imagination of man could hardly picture the stimulus to wheat culture that would result.
"With a fixed price of one dollar per bushel in London, called for by Mr. Atkinson's conditions, the American farmers can find increased profit in two possible sources: decreased cost of transportation to London, and lessening cost of wheat production in Minnesota. A detailed analysis of the various charges that constitute the present cost of transporting wheat from the Red River Valley of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and of Manitoba to London gives reasonable assurance of a reduction in the next few years of at least five and possibly seven cents per bushel in such cost. Here is an almost certain addition, in the next few years, of from five to seven cents a bushel to the profit of American-grown wheat, providing only its average selling price in London remains practically unchanged.
"A careful study of farm methods among Minnesota farmers discloses this fact: Some wheat growers, with the best farm machinery, and employing the best methods of agriculture, make a profit in wheat raising of from ten to fifteen cents a bushel more than do their less intelligent and less progressive neighbors. Now, the tendency in the State and throughout the Northwest is to bring, by education and a general exchange of methods, the poorer farmers up to the level of the best. This change is rapidly taking place. It will not require fifteen years to realize its consummation. When the methods and facilities of the average farmer are brought up to the level of the best of the present time, this change, with the change above noted in transportation charges, will add to the average profit of Minnesota farmers in growing wheat a total of not less than fifteen and possibly of over twenty cents a bushel. Such a change would more than double the existing net profit of the wheat grower in the Northwest. Could it be maintained for a series of years, as is presupposed under Mr. Atkinson's supposition of London prices, it would furnish such an incentive to wheat growing in Minnesota and the surrounding territory as has as yet never been experienced. A million families of immigrants would pour into the great Northwest within the next twenty to twenty-five years. They would take up all the existing vacant lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The lands suitable for irrigation in these States and in Montana would be set to growing wheat. The wave of humanity anxious to raise wheat for a dollar a bushel in London would sweep past the boundaries of the four States mentioned, and carry the cultivation of that cereal all over Manitoba, Assiniboia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. In these four British provinces and in the four American States, dollar wheat in London would in twenty years open more acres of good land to wheat than are now subject to the plow within their borders. Even then the beginning only would have been made to the possibilities of wheat culture in the British Northwest. Settlements would not have extended as far north as St. Petersburg in Russia; neither would settlers have trenched upon the lands with a climate as severe as that of the Russian metropolis.
"The foregoing is a brief statement of what dollar wheat in London would do for one section of North America in stimulating wheat cultivation. If that statement is based upon a true conception, as the writer believes it is, of the possibilities of the American Northwest, it demonstrates how impossible it will be to maintain dollar wheat in London for any great length of time in the future. It also shows that Mr. Atkinson is wrong in not asserting a sure continuation of that decline in wheat prices which he so fully predicted in 1880."
Cost of Shipping Wheat per Bushel from Moorhead, an Interior Point in Minnesota, to Liverpool.
| On May 27, 1898. | On July 9, 1898. | On August 20, 1898. | On September 17, 1898. | |
| Cts. per bu. | Cts. per bu. | Cts. per bu. | Cts. per bu. | |
| Rate, Moorhead to Duluth | 9.30 | 9.30 | 8.70 | 8.70 |
| Duluth elevator and inspection charges | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 | 0.80 |
| Lake freight, Duluth to Buffalo | 1.40 | 1.25 | 1.25 | 1.75 |
| Elevator charges and commission at Buffalo | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Canal freight, Buffalo to New York | 3.00 | 3.00 | 2.75 | 2.50 |
| Elevator charges, etc., in New York | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 | 2.00 |
| Ocean freight, New York to Liverpool | 8.00 | 3.50 | 4.50 | 6.00 |
| Totals | 25.50 | 20.85 | 21.00 | 22.75 |
| General average, 22.525 cents per bushel. | ||||
It will be remarked that Mr. Powers says I am wrong in not asserting a sure continuation of the decline in the price of wheat which I predicted in 1880. In setting up one dollar a bushel in London as the standard of this inquiry, I had no thought that our farmers could be made happy for the next thirty years by any hope of securing so high a price. In my predictions in 1880 I said that the time was not then far off when the farmers of the Mississippi Valley would secure as large a remuneration from their wheat at thirty-four shillings per quarter in London as they had been gaining from a previous average of fifty-two shillings. I might then have fixed the lessened price at twenty-eight shillings, and at the present time I have a greater expectation of a reduction in the price of wheat in Mark Lane to less than twenty-eight shillings a quarter, or eighty-five cents a bushel, than I had in 1880 that it would so soon reach thirty-four shillings. I merely adopted a dollar a bushel as an arbitrary standard on which an abundant supply of bread at low cost would be absolutely assured to the people of England.
In fact, as I stated before the Royal Commission on Depression of Agriculture, it is not probable that a reduction in the price of wheat to forty cents a bushel on Western farms or sixty-five to seventy cents a bushel in England would stop the growth of this grain, although it might check an increase. When the price went down to a very low point on the last excessive crop it is probable that 100,000,000 bushels of wheat were fed to swine and to cattle. It proved to make better pork and beef than maize or Indian corn, and, as the price of meat did not decline in anything like the proportion to the price of wheat, the farmers who thus fed their excess secured a profit which the sale of the crude grain might not have given.