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Show WASTE WOT, WANT NOT (The following editorial was printed in the Utah Valley News of February 10, 1939. While it was written for Utah county, the conditions are similar in Beaver and the message of the editorial is both applicable and timely for this county.) Utah is a poor state, so they all say. Only three per cent of her land is arable; the average size of her farms is under 20 acres; yearly she loses her best citizens the youth graduating from her universities to other states where opportunity op-portunity beckons to them ; the mortgage debt of her farms has risen to many millions, which with high interest rates and high taxes, together with unstable prices and occasional occasion-al dry weather with insufficient water for irrigation, all coupled with decreasing soil fertility, accounts for the perilous peri-lous state in which most people find themselves in Utah. What can be done about it? S. R. Boswell, Utah county agricultural agent, gave some important suggestions to a "Personal Welfare" group in Utah stake. Summed up his ansyer is: "Waste not". Only 14 per cent of the water of this state.already stored, and put into our ditches, ever reach the plant. That is our first most damaging waste. Plenty more water exists, but before we spend more millions to build dams and reservoirs perhaps we should find better methods of irrigation. With only three per cent of our land possible of cultivation cultiva-tion Utah allows thousands of acres to grow weeds instead of crops. In Utah county we have 20,000 acres of weeds, equivalent to a first mortgage of $70 an acre on all that land. That is our second great waste. Cooperative effort by cities, counties, state, and federal agencies with every individual farmer is the only solution. Our third great waste is our interest load. Our mortgage mort-gage debt is tremendous, bringing about a vicious circle in which more farms are foreclosed for interest and taxes, increasing in-creasing the tax load on the remainder which again forecloses fore-closes more and again iricreaies the tax load. "Interest never sleeps, nor sickens, nor dies. It never goes to the hospital. It works Sundays and holidays, never taking a vacation. It never visits or travels. It takes no pleasures. It is never laid off work, nor discharged from employment. It never works on reduced hours. It never has short crops. It never pays taxes. It buys no food, nor clothes, nor shelter. It requires no repairs, no replacements, no shingling, no plumbing, painting or whitewashing. Once in debt, interest is your constant companion every minute of the day or night. You cannot shun it. or slip away from it. You cannot dismiss it. It yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders. Whenever you get in its way or cross its path it crushes you," says President J. Reuben Clark. Our fourth great waste is the unecomic use of the resources re-sources we do have. Utah buys more than $11,000,000 of liquor and tobacco yeearly enough money to buy the capital stock of every bank in the state enough money to payoff in a few years all our indebtedness. Utah county alone spends more than $200,000 yearly for hard liquor only to say nothing no-thing of beer and tobacco. Not until we get a better idea of our economic needs than this can we with any conscience say we are a "poor state". The facts are that Utah is one of the richest states in the Union, but the most poorly managed for our resources. It is high time we awakened and heeded the old adage: Waste not, want not. o |
