Farmer's Market

Farmers who strolled into a machinery exhibit at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines last week stopped and stared. Nestled between a shiny red cultivator and a new Ford tractor was a stock and grain brokerage office. A Trans-Lux projector flashed ticker tape reports from the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago's Board of Trade; two salesmen chalked up stock quotations and commodity prices on a big blackboard.

Since the farmer seldom comes to Wall Street, the firm of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane has decided to bring Wall Street to the farmer.- Explained Merrill Lynch's Des Moines manager Mike Dearth: "The farmer has made a hell of a lot of dough in the last few years. It ought to be put to work."

To catch the farmer's eye, Merrill Lynch posted stock certificates of companies as familiar to farmers as Sears, Roebuck & Co., General Motors Corp., General Electric Co. and Corn Products Refining Co., and pointed out that the shares have been paying 5 to 7%. Though Merrill Lynch was careful not to draw the comparison, this is far bigger than the return that farmers get from savings banks.

Besides stock brokerage accounts, Merrill Lynch hoped to interest prospective traders in the commodity futures market, showing farmers that they could use it to protect them against unexpected price breaks and get better prices for their crops. One farmer who listened to an explanation of how General Mills buys & sells futures, not to speculate but to hedge itself against inventory losses, commented: "And here I thought all the time that they were just playing craps with my corn!"

While brokerage firms were hustling in the hustings, there was still a virgin market in at least one big city. The 1949 consumer survey made by the St. Paul Dispatch-Pioneer Press reported that 90% of St. Paul citizens in top salary brackets had never bought a share of stock or a corporation bond.

-At least six other New York Stock Exchange houses have similar exhibits scheduled at agricultural fairs throughout the East and Midwest next month.

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