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52 about the same replenishment and renewal of productive plant that the railroads are now going through.

Before 1933 three-fourths of the farm buildings will require new roofs and new paint. Probably a half million new houses, barns and auxiliary buildings will have to be built. Half the present mileage of fencing will have to be replaced and much new fence put up. Millions of new tile must be laid.

The haying and harvest machinery will have to be replaced almost entirely; tillage machinery in large part; wagons, harnesses, in part. Millions of new automobiles, tractors and trucks must be bought. Millions of tons of new piping, wiring, barn equipment and small tools; millions of new gas engines and stationary power appliances; millions of feet of lumber and tons of cement must all be bought.

Millions of tons of fertilizer and lime must be poured into the soil of the East and South to restore pre-war fertility. The country’s work horses are old and before 1933 almost a new crop must be raised.

The men who control great capital resources must realize agriculture’s real and unusual need for new capital, and they must realize that farming in this country is still a basic industry—an industry with a future that will pay ample returns on every dollar wisely invested. One of the rural community’s very serious problems during the next five or ten years will be debt.

There is great ground for suspicion that the farmers themselves, who are estimated to own nearly one third of the automobiles in the United States have bought and operated them at the expense of the upkeep of their principal—their roofs, fences, land fertility, etc. In doing so they have diverted demand from certain classes of raw materials and labor to other classes and thereby have contributed to the unbalancing of the old economic equilibrium and the promotion of the high prices which now plague them. The automobile manufacturer bids mechanics and materials away from other industries and waxes rich. The fertilizer manufacturers on the other hand have found themselves hard-pressed to keep out of receiverships.

Dr. L. C. Gray, in a paper in the American Economic Review, Supplement, for March, 1923, estimated the value of the farm capital of the United States at the beginning of 1920 as follows: