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Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, August 09, 2007 at 14:58:14 :

In Reply to: A little correction...... posted by Howard in Newcastle on Thursday, August 09, 2007 at 09:59:59 :

You said it better than I was trying to, but that's what I was getting at. After WWI, hard times hit American farmers long before the official "depression", so when the city people started squawking about hard times, the farmers basically thought, "welcome to the club".

Farming now is a whole different business. There are very few self-sufficient small farms. The big ones are basically just factories, and everybody needs money for gas, electricity, food, taxes, insurance, fertilizer, diesel, machinery, and on it goes. In the 30s, most farmers were probably like my family in that all they needed cash for was to pay the county taxes, and buy flour, sugar, coffee, and maybe some clothes. Income tax was still only for the rich. They didn't have utility water, gas, or electricity. They still kept a team and could plow with horse power if need be, although many had some sort of tractor. They could live on what they grew and could patch everything over and over if need be. Kids were too tired working to pitch a fit if they didn't get a big mound of shiny new toys every Christmas. The farmers who mortgaged their farms were in big trouble, unlike today, not everybody had a mortgage. The county taxes mainly went to road maintenance, compared to nowadays when something like 80% goes to law enforcement in the more populated counties. Families were big and everybody worked. A bachelor could get room and board, if not any pay, in exchange for whatever work needed to be done on a nearby farm. My grandfather was probably typical in doing a bit of whatever work there was to do. He had 97 acres and tried sheep, wheat, and turkeys, depending on what there was a market for at the time. He logged most of the time, either as a gyppo or for Weyerhaeuser or Crown. Many of the merchants in town carried the farmers on credit until the depression was over, which is something I doubt any credit card company would do today. My grandmother continued all her life to shop at the store that had been generous with credit to them 50 years earlier. Barter was a lot more common.

I think hard times would be a lot harder now because everybody is so over-extended and there's very little most people can even do for themselves in terms of food, clothing, or housing. It took the biggest war in history, massive government borrowing, make-work projects that bordered on socialism, and a huge devaluation of the US dollar to get us out of the Great Depression. That's probably what it will take next time too.



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