New Ways In Farming (1945)

From time immemorial, the tilling of the soil has been mankind's primary occupation. Poets have given dignity to the role of him who sows and reaps, the keeper of flocks and herds, living by toil and the sweat of his brow. The virtues of rural life are recorded in all literature, from the poems of Horace and Virgil in antiquity down to those of America's Robert Frost today. Traditionally abundant is the farmer's kitchen, filled with good things from garden, field, and barnyard. For our thinking, a symbol of good living, health, and independence. This idea of the rural life as one of contentment and material plenty is deeply ingrained in the minds of most Americans. The fact that farmers have known years of poverty, of near famine and disaster in many regions of the United States, has not discouraged man's instinctive desire to live in direct contact with the soil that gives him sustenance. Yet so diverse and complex are the problems of America's farms that the Department of Agriculture, largest division of the federal government next to the Army and Navy, has made assistance to farmers its full-time business since 1862, year of its founding by Abraham Lincoln. Responsible to the nation in peace as in war for the productiveness of its soil and the welfare of the nearly 50% of our total population who live by and on it, the Department of Agriculture has offered much-needed counsel to American farmers ever since Civil War days. Today, regularly employed by the Department of Agriculture are over 75,000 men and women. By far the greater part of them skilled specialists and scientists whose main job is to help the US farmer in cooperation with his state and local government. Through four short years, from August 1914 to November 1918, America became the great provider of Europe's food and war supplies. US farmers raised more cattle and hogs, grew more of every basic crop than ever before in the nation's history. Spurred on by boom prices, US farmers mortgaged their futures to buy land at fantastic prices and plowed up millions of acres for wartime crops. Moving into the Great Plains, they converted grazing lands into grain fields, planted wheat where no wheat had ever grown before and none should ever have grown. While this four-year boom, farmers paid heavily when post-war depression brought bankruptcy and foreclosure to hundreds of thousands. But greatest loss to the nation came when rains and floods, washing over treeless, grassless acres, swept away forever billions of tons of irreplaceable fertile topsoil. Thus today, US Soil Conservation Service reports 100 million acres of land either completely eroded or damaged. 200 million more threatened with erosion. Completing the work of destruction with the disastrous years of drought, when wind, stripping the idle farmlands, made a lifeless desert of thousands of square miles of once rich territory. In the 1930s, driven from their homes by the marching desert, whole farm communities became landless wanderers without means of subsistence, presenting the nation with a new problem. Thousands upon thousands of landless families became an added factor in the combination of poverty, falling markets, and unsold surpluses, which prolonged the worst depression in all US history. And in the deep South, on land farmed for centuries, man's long-continued failure to put back into the soil what he took out was punished by nature in impoverishment. As a result, southern one-crop farming has left 33% of the US farm population with less than 15% of the nation's farm income. Grappling with the problem of proper land use is Georgia's distinguished native son, textile tycoon Cason Callaway, who feels that only southern energy and initiative can solve the South's farm problems. At his 30,000 acre Blue Springs Farms near LaGrange in the Piedmont region of Georgia, Callaway is breaking ground for a new era for the South he loved. Here bulldozers shape the land profile into farmable contours so that land wasted by generations of one crop farming may be replenished by soil enriching crops like sericea lespedeza, a forage whose fame is rapidly spreading as a gully healing remedy for eroded soil. Having chosen his land from among the worst of the South could offer, Callaway is also restoring it to use through such old time US crops as the scuppernong grape, prized for its wine since America's earliest days. And the ubiquitous blueberry, which has also been found to grow luxuriantly on soil too impoverished to support other crops. But major crop at Blue Springs Farms, because of its power to restore depleted southern land, is kudzu, a little known vine imported from China. High in carotene and protein content, growing readily in eroded gullies, kudzu offers nourishment not only to animals, but to man in the form of soups and vitamin preparations. Milestone in the South's difficult transition from the cabin on the cotton setup is Blue Springs Farms dehydrating plant, first to produce artificially dried hay in the South. Kudzu, hay, and lespedeza are processed in 30 minutes from field to bags, thus saving all the precious vitamin A so frequently lost by traditional Callaway's livestock, grazing on restored pastures, fatten quickly and provide natural fertilizer necessary to any well-rounded soil conservation project. Having proved by his 5 years of experimentation that even the most depleted land can be brought back into highly diversified production, Callaway is today trying out other operations such as duck raising, possible for farms with small capital and little machinery. A significant new solution to the eternal problems of agriculture is to make farming a big-scale modern industry. For years, North American wheat has been produced most profitably on large farms. But today, none is more thoroughly industrialized than the 50,000-acre Tulare Lake Ranch in San Joaquin Valley, California, where giant combines licked the wartime labor shortage. With a few skilled men operating huge fleets of these and other costly machines, owner of Van Glahn has been able to slash labor costs a third. Moving his grain from field to elevator at the rate of 600 tons daily, he has demonstrated that with plenty of capital and good management, mechanized agriculture can be made as profitable a big business as any other. But it is to US truck farming that industrial methods have brought the most revolutionary development. Seabrook Farms in South New Jersey is America's biggest, most fabulous truck garden, whose 15,000 acres surround a vegetable processing plant. With assets today valued at $10 million, uh Seabrook employs over 3,000 unionized workers whose rate of pay has no relation to seasonal farm prices. Agronomist Seabrook, aided by his two sons, is carrying on a family tradition of progressive, imaginative farming. With assembly-line precision, each operation at Seabrook's follows detailed charts made out the year before, accounting for every day of the 7-month season. Seabrook's hired hands are provided with modern living quarters, and field and office workers may obtain inexpensive meals at the farm cafeteria. Harvesting peas at Seabrook Farms is an object lesson in scientific management. Modern machines mow and load vines and peas, which are later threshed at the central processing plant. Characteristic of Seabrook's big-scale methods, a fleet of airplanes dusts his crops with insecticides at the rate of an acre per plane per minute, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of man-hours. But most drastic innovation in truck farming is the fact that at Seabrook's cannery, vegetables pass from field to can in less than 3 hours, reducing vitamin loss to a minimum. Seabrook's methods in handling vegetables, canned, dehydrated, or frozen in the largest quick freeze plant in America, threaten to revolutionize truck farming practices throughout the nation. Today in many a rural community, the ominous challenge of mass production farming threatens the none too secure livelihood of the hard-working independent farmer. The better to equip themselves to farm smartly and profitably so that they can compete with the big producer, enterprising small farmers all over the US are finding in increasing numbers their solution in cooperatives. Since the First World War, these voluntary farmers co-ops have grown to be a vital factor in the agricultural economy of the nation. Among the most widespread of all present-day cooperatives, are those made possible by the Rural Electrification Administration, which during the past 9 years has been granting loans to small farmers, enabling them to finance power systems. Over 1 million farms throughout the nation have become electrified through REA, increasing fourfold the number of farmers using light and power. And despite wartime restrictions on materials and skilled labor, REA still managed to complete an occasional highly welcome power project. Electric power isn't something just for few of us. It's not a luxury for a rich man. It's a farmer's working tool. It now gives me great deal of pleasure on behalf of the directors and members by declaring the first part of the signal electric line energized. Electric power, made possible by government loans totaling $400 million, is letting farmers in is letting farmers in remote areas use many labor-saving devices. With electric power on his property, the small farmer can exploit his land with greater efficiency, broaden the scope and multiply the variety of his farming, and materially increase his farm income. Many a farmer's wife looks ahead to a post-war world in which modern kitchen devices to lighten her daily tasks once more will be available. But though science has pointed the way toward new horizons in agriculture, which the alert US farmer accepts, always there will be those content to follow the traditional ways of their forefathers. For on many a small farm in America, as throughout the world, farming is not and never will be a modern business, but will remain primarily a rule of thumb craft, an age-old and hallowed way of life.