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Show i THIS BUSINESS & SUSAN THAYER Ul i ; MEET THE FARMERS A friend sent me quite an inter- esting little .nook this week "Meet the Farmers" written by Ladd Haystead, who writes a farm column and has farmed in a lot of states himself. Mr. Haystead gives some figures fig-ures that were rather enlightening to me. I didn't realize, did you, that 23 per cent nearly a quarter of our population are farmers? Or that those of us who live in. country towns and work for, serve or sell to the farmers make up another 23 per cent? Well, this book makes the very sensible point that although America Amer-ica is known as the greatest industrial in-dustrial nation on earth, actually we are still fundamentally an agricultural ag-ricultural people. Keep agriculture healthy, he says, ana the whole economy will be healthy. In other words, if the 30,000,000 who live on farms and the nearly 30,000,000 who live in small towns and cities if all these people have the money to buy clothes and new dining room sets, refrigerators refrigera-tors and baby carriages, then the other half of the country industry indus-try and labor that is will be kept busy filling the demand. There's nothing new about all this, as the author points out. But it seems to be something we forget for-get very easily. I've been thinking quite a lot about it since reading the book, and I don't mind saving that the idea of a balanced economy, based on a prosperous agricultural population, makes a good deal of sense to me. |