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Show Boom in Farm Prices and Rapid Turnover Prompts Fears Collapse Will Follow Peace Memory of Bust After World War I Still Is Vivid to the Farmers When GI Joe comes back to his farm home from the war he may find a lot of new faces around the neighborhood. And he may miss a lot of the old familiar ones. The family up the road may have moved bag and baggage to Oregon. A new owner may be tilling the bottom lands on the back eighty. Rural America is on the move. Farmers, like their city cousins, have been shifting their base of operations op-erations at an ever-increasing tempo tem-po in the months since Pearl Harbor. Har-bor. More farms are changing hands this year than at any time in the past generation. They are changing for scores of reasons, but back of almost every sale is the chance to strike pay dirt to realize a profit on the old homestead. Many farm folks are frankly concerned con-cerned over this trend. They are troubled not so much about the migration mi-gration as they are about the steady increase in farm real estate transactions. transac-tions. They fear that the long threatened threat-ened land inflation is under way. And they are asking themselves: "Will the old cycle of boom and bust be repeated?" Every previous war has brought its own land boom that left a wreckage wreck-age of deflation behind. The collapse col-lapse of the speculative era following follow-ing World War I is painfully fresh in the memory of many a farmer. considered fairly representative, it is estimated that farm land prices have risen about 17 per cent .between .be-tween April, 1943, and April, 1944. From the beginning of the year until April 1, the advance has been about 2 per cent. The increases have been largest in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, in which states the per cent of purchases pur-chases by city investors wai largest, larg-est, being 30 to 37 per cent of all sales. It is true that farmers have been using much of their larger incomes to buy bonds and to pay off debts. The steadily decreasing volume of farm mortgage debt is evidence of this trend. But now reports indicate indi-cate that heavier debts are frequently fre-quently being assumed when farms are bought. This is especially true of tenants who are buying on contract con-tract or with relatively small down payments. All Sorts of Buyers. Surveys by county banks indicate that all types of farm buyers are now in the market. Tenants are acquiring their own farms. Owners are expanding their present units or are taking on additional acreage, perhaps for sons now in the service. Even large commercial farms in some instances are changing hands at increasing prices. Local business busi-ness and professional people and city investors bent on hedging against inflation or higher income taxes are buying land. War plant workers, too, are making purchases, expecting to turn to farming when their munitions jobs are ended. ' All these conditions are reminiscent reminis-cent of what occurred in World War I, for that too, was a story of agricultural agri-cultural upsurge. Farm income rose from 6 billions in 1914 to 14 |
