"You're Stealing Every Day": A Redmond Dairyman's Anonymous Cry
Writing to Seattle's dairy journal under a pen name, a Redmond farmer accuses the creameries of skimming pounds off every can of cream and getting rich on other men's cows — and the editor answers with a demand for a name he can prosecute.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Editor The Ranch:
I want to write a piece for the benefit of the farmers or dairymen, as we all know, or ought to know, how awfully we are cheated by our creamery men. How can they get rich making butter for two cents a pound and hire six or seven men, and, as I understand, they pay their bookkeeper $1,800, besides all their other men from $2.50 to $3 a day, and the men on the road soliciting $8 a day and expenses? I talked to one man, and he was honest enough to own he could not pay such wages and make anything at it, besides making cans vary from two to five pounds on a can. It seems strange it will vary so much for them and does not for us. We can churn ten gallons week after week, and it won't vary one pound, and I made them own they had no better test than the churn.
Now, if you are going to charge three or four cents per pound for making this butter, say so; but don't steal enough to pay expenses and get rich off of us poor farmers. We can't get rich off of our cream, and don't hire any help, either. You're stealing every day, and the farmers just sit still and let you do it. But if some poor man would come along your streets and steal a loaf of bread, the "cop" would run him in. Oh, well, he is a poor man and has no stand-in, and perhaps you belong to church and wear a cloak. Quite a number are making butter instead of letting the creamery men make it, for then they get what is in it.
Mr. Editor: Please word this right and print it in your Ranch. I am getting tired of being robbed. — SUBSCRIBER, Redmond, Wn.
The above are grave charges. If they are true we want to know it. If any creamery in this state is robbing its patrons in the manner described, we will, upon receipt of information, ourselves have the proprietors prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The Ranch would make every effort to convict anyone guilty of such practices. But what we want are not a lot of wild surmises, but specific statements. Give us something to base our prosecution on. And sign your name!
“But if some poor man would come along your streets and steal a loaf of bread, the "cop" would run him in.”
Redmond in the 1900s was dairy country: Sammamish Valley cream went by wagon and rail to Seattle creameries, and the farmer's share of the final price was set by the man who owned the separator and the churn. The grievance is durable — the processor and the middleman capture the margin while the producer argues over cents per pound — and so is the editor's problem: an unsigned accusation nobody can take to court. Redmond's farmland now competes with a very different economy, but fights over who takes a cut of what a grower produces have hardly gone away.
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