The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in EuropeWashington, Booker T.
History
The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe
Washington, Booker T.
Poor -- Europe; Working class -- Europe
One difference between the farmer in Denmark and in other countries
is that, whereas the ordinary farmer raises his crops and ships them
to the market to be sold, the Danish farmer sells nothing but the
manufactured product, and as far as possible he sells it direct to
the consumer. For example, until about 1880 Denmark was still a grain
exporting country; in recent years, however, it has become a grain
importing country. Grain and fodder of various kinds to the value
of something like twenty-five millions of dollars are now annually
purchased by Danish farmers in Russia and neighbouring countries. The
agricultural products thus imported are fed to the cattle, swine, and
chickens and thus converted into butter, pork, and eggs. The butter
is manufactured in a coöperative dairy; the pork is slaughtered in
a coöperative pork-packing house; the eggs are collected and packed
by a coöperative egg-collecting association. Then they are either
sold direct, or are turned over to a central coöperative selling
association, which disposes of the most of them in England. The annual
exports to England amount to nearly $90,000,000 a year, of which
$51,000,000 is for butter, nearly $30,000,000 for bacon, and the
remainder for eggs.
As a gentleman whom I met in Denmark put it: "If Denmark, like
ancient Gaul, were divided into three parts, one of these would be
butter, another pork, and the third eggs." It is from these things
that the country, in the main, gets its living. There are in Denmark,
as elsewhere, railways, newspapers, telephones, merchants, preachers,
teachers, and all the other accessories of a high civilization, but
they are all supported from the sale of butter, pork, and eggs,
to which ought to be added cattle, for Denmark still exports a
considerable amount of beef and live cattle. The export of live cattle
has, however, fallen from about $21,000,000 a year in 1880 to about
$7,000,000, but in the same period the excess of butter, bacon, and
eggs has risen from something like $7,000,000 to over $70,000,000.
Meanwhile the raw production of the Danish farms has increased 50 per
cent. and more, the difference being that, instead of producing grains
for the manufacture of flour and meal, the Danish farmers have turned
their attention to producing root crops to feed their cattle. This
means that the peasant in Denmark is not merely a scientific farmer, as
I have already suggested, but he is at the same time, in a small way, a
business man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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