Excerpt from Farm Financing and Business Prosperity The fact that agriculture is the keystone of the American economic and business structure has been more widely advertised during the past five years, and has been brought home to everyone of us more forcibly, than at any time in the history of the country. A food conservation placard, embodying the art and technical skill of the advertising profession, hung in every kitchen throughout the land during the war; and every placard emphasized our dependence upon the farmer. Recently, magazines and newspapers of every description, reaching all parts of the country and all kinds of readers, have been full of discussion of the problems of the farmer. In 1920, just as the farmer was beginning to harvest his crops, the price of farm products, and with it the purchasing power of the farmer, declined abruptly. The effect upon our industries was immediate. Orders were cancelled, mills and factories shut down, and smokeless chimneys, idle cars, and jobless workers advertised in a very effective, though decidedly unpleasant, way the dependence of business upon the farmers' buying power. The Farmer the Greatest Producer, Borrower, and Buyer The farmer is the most essential cog in the driving wheel of the American business machine. He is the greatest producer, borrower, and buyer in the United States. The aggregate value, on the farm, of last year's agricultural output was more than $12,000,000,000, equal to more than two-thirds of the world's total international trade. And last year was a year of low values. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.