THE FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST
That it may please Thee to give and preserve to our use the kindly
fruits of the earth, so that in due time we may enjoy them.--_The
Litany._
When spring marches up the Mississippi valley and the snows of the
broad plains find companionship with the snows of yesteryear, the
traveller, journeying east or west, is aware that life has awakened in
the fields. The winter wheat lies green upon countless acres; thousands
of ploughshares turn the fertile earth; the farmer, after the enforced
idleness of winter, is again a man of action.
Last year (1917), that witnessed our entrance into the greatest of
wars, the American farmer produced 3,159,000,000 bushels of corn,
660,000,000 bushels of wheat, 1,587,000,000 bushels of oats, 60,000,000
bushels of rye. From the day of our entrance into the world struggle
against autocracy the American farm has been the subject of a new
scrutiny. In all the chancelleries of the world crop reports and
estimates are eagerly scanned and tabulated, for while the war lasts
and far into the period of rehabilitation and reconstruction that
will follow, America must bear the enormous responsibility, not merely
of training and equipping armies, building ships, and manufacturing
munitions, but of feeding the nations. The farmer himself is roused
to a new consciousness of his importance; he is aware that thousands
of hands are thrust toward him from over the sea, that every acre of
his soil and every ear of corn and bushel of wheat in his bins or in
process of cultivation has become a factor in the gigantic struggle to
preserve and widen the dominion of democracy.
I
“Better be a farmer, son; the corn grows while you sleep!”
This remark, addressed to me in about my sixth year by my great-uncle,
a farmer in central Indiana, lingered long in my memory. There was
no disputing his philosophy; corn, intelligently planted and tended,
undoubtedly grows at night as well as by day. But the choice of seed
demands judgment, and the preparation of the soil and the subsequent
care of the growing corn exact hard labor. My earliest impressions of
farm life cannot be dissociated from the long, laborious days, the
monotonous plodding behind the plough, the incidental “chores,” the
constant apprehensions as to drought or flood. The country cousins I
visited in Indiana and Illinois were all too busy to have much time
for play. I used to sit on the fence or tramp beside the boys as they
drove the plough, or watch the girls milk the cows or ply the churn,
oppressed by an overmastering homesickness. And when the night shut
down and the insect chorus floated into the quiet house the isolation
was intensified.
My father and his forebears were born and bred to the soil; they
scratched the earth all the way from North Carolina into Kentucky and
on into Indiana and Illinois. I had just returned, last fall, from a
visit to the grave of my grandfather in a country churchyard in central
Illinois, round which the corn stood in solemn phalanx, when I received
a note from my fifteen-year-old boy, in whom I had hopefully looked for
atavistic tendencies. From his school in Connecticut he penned these
depressing tidings:
“I have decided never to be a farmer. Yesterday the school was marched
three miles to a farm where the boys picked beans all afternoon and
then walked back. Much as I like beans and want to help Mr. Hoover
conserve our resources, this was rubbing it in. I never want to see a
bean again.”
I have heard a score of successful business and professional men say
that they intended to “make farmers” of their boys, and a number of
these acquaintances have succeeded in sending their sons through
agricultural schools, but the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western
pioneers are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling.
It isn’t necessary for gentlemen who watch the tape for crop
forecasts to be able to differentiate wheat from oats to appreciate
the importance to the prosperous course of general business of a big
yield in the grain-fields; but to the average urban citizen farming is
something remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets
in regions that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or
the window of a limited train. Great numbers of Middle Western city
men indulge in farming as a pastime--and in a majority of cases it is,
from the testimony of these absentee proprietors, a pleasant recreation
but an expensive one. However, all city men who gratify a weakness
for farming are not faddists; many such land-owners manage their
plantations with intelligence and make them earn dividends. Mr. George
Ade’s Indiana farm, Hazelden, is one of the State’s show-places. The
playwright and humorist says that its best feature is a good nine-hole
golf-course and a swimming-pool, but from his “home plant” of 400 acres
he cultivates 2,000 acres of fertile Hoosier soil.
A few years ago a manufacturer of my acquaintance, whose family
presents a clear urban line for a hundred years, purchased a farm on
the edge of a river--more, I imagine, for the view it afforded of a
pleasant valley than because of its fertility. An architect entered
sympathetically into the business of making habitable a century-old
log house, a transition effected without disturbing any of the timbers
or the irregular lines of floors and ceilings. So much time was spent
in these restorations and readjustments that the busy owner in despair
fell upon a mail-order catalogue to complete his preparations for
occupancy. A barn, tenant’s house, poultry-house, pump and windmill,
fencing, and every vehicle and tool needed on the place, including a
barometer and wind-gauge, he ordered by post. His joy in his acres was
second only to his satisfaction in the ease with which he invoked all
the apparatus necessary to his comfort. Every item arrived exactly as
the catalogue promised; with the hired man’s assistance he fitted the
houses together and built a tower for the windmill out of concrete made
in a machine provided by the same establishment. His only complaint
was that the catalogue didn’t offer memorial tablets, as he thought
it incumbent upon him to publish in brass the merits of the obscure
pioneer who had laboriously fashioned his cabin before the convenient
method of post-card ordering had been discovered.
II
Imaginative literature has done little to invest the farm with
glamour. The sailor and the warrior, the fisherman and the hunter are
celebrated in song and story, but the farmer has inspired no ringing
saga or iliad, and the lyric muse has only added to the general joyless
impression of the husbandman’s life. Hesiod and Virgil wrote with
knowledge of farming; Virgil’s instructions to the ploughman only
need to be hitched to a tractor to bring them up to date, and he was
an authority on weather signs. But Horace was no farmer; the Sabine
farm is a joke. The best Gray could do for the farmer was to send him
homeward plodding his weary way. Burns, at the plough, apostrophized
the daisy, but only by indirection did he celebrate the joys of
farm life. Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” sang a melancholy strain;
“Snow-Bound” offers a genial picture, but it is of winter-clad fields.
Carleton’s “Farm Ballads” sing of poverty and domestic infelicity.
Riley made a philosopher and optimist of his Indiana farmer, but his
characters are to be taken as individuals rather than as types. There
is, I suppose, in every Middle Western county a quizzical, quaint
countryman whose sayings are quoted among his neighbors, but the man
with a hundred acres of land to till, wood to cut, and stock to feed is
not greatly given to poetry or humor.
English novels of rural life are numerous but they are usually in a low
key. I have a lingering memory of Hardy’s “Woodlanders” as a book of
charm, and his tragic “Tess” is probably fiction’s highest venture in
this field. “Lorna Doone” I remember chiefly because it established in
me a distaste for mutton. George Eliot and George Meredith are other
English novelists who have written of farm life, nor may I forget Mr.
Eden Phillpotts. French fiction, of course, offers brilliant exceptions
to the generalization that literature has neglected the farmer; but,
in spite of the vast importance of the farm in American life, there
is in our fiction no farm novel of distinction. Mr. Hamlin Garland,
in “Main Traveled Roads” and in his autobiographical chronicle “A Son
of the Middle Border,” has thrust his plough deep; but the truth as
we know it to be disclosed in these instances is not heartening. The
cowboy is the jolliest figure in our fiction, the farmer the dreariest.
The shepherd and the herdsman have fared better in all literatures
than the farmer, perhaps because their vocations are more leisurely
and offer opportunities for contemplation denied the tiller of the
soil. The Hebrew prophets and poets were mindful of the pictorial and
illustrative values of herd and flock. It is written, “Our cattle also
shall go with us,” and, journeying across the mountain States, where
there is always a herd blurring the range, one thinks inevitably of
man’s long migration in quest of the Promised Land.
The French peasant has his place in art, but here again we are
confronted by joylessness, though I confess that I am resting my case
chiefly upon Millet. What Remington did for the American cattle-range
no one has done for the farm. Fields of corn and wheat are painted
truthfully and effectively, but the critics have withheld their highest
praise from these performances. Perhaps a corn-field is not a proper
subject for the painter; or it may be that the Maine rocks or a group
of birches against a Vermont hillside “compose” better or are supported
by a nobler tradition. The most alluring pictures I recall of farm life
have been advertisements depicting vast fields of wheat through which
the delighted husbandman drives a reaper with all the jauntiness of a
king practising for a chariot-race.
I have thus run skippingly through the catalogues of bucolic literature
and art to confirm my impression as a layman that farming is not an
affair of romance, poetry, or pictures, but a business, exacting and
difficult, that may be followed with success only by industrious and
enlightened practitioners. The first settlers of the Mississippi valley
stand out rather more attractively than their successors of what I
shall call the intermediate period. There was no turning back for the
pioneers who struck boldly into the unknown, knowing that if they
failed to establish themselves and solve the problem of subsisting
from the virgin earth they would perish. The battle was to the strong,
the intelligent, the resourceful. The first years on a new farm in
wilderness or prairie were a prolonged contest between man and nature,
nature being as much a foe as an ally. That the social spark survived
amid arduous labor and daily self-sacrifice is remarkable; that the
earth was subdued to man’s will and made to yield him its kindly fruits
is a tribute to the splendid courage and indomitable faith of the
settlers.
These Middle Western pioneers were in the fullest sense the sons of
democracy. The Southern planter with the traditions of the English
country gentleman behind him and, in slavery time, representing a
survival of the feudal order, had no counterpart in the West, where the
settler was limited in his holdings to the number of acres that he and
his sons could cultivate by their own labor. I explored, last year,
much of the Valley of Democracy, both in seed-time and in harvest.
We had been drawn at last into the world war, and its demands and
conjectures as to its outcome were upon the lips of men everywhere.
It was impossible to avoid reflecting upon the part these plains have
played in the history of America and the increasing part they are
destined to play in the world history of the future. Every wheat shoot,
every stalk of corn was a new testimony to the glory of America. Not
an acre of land but had been won by intrepid pioneers who severed
all ties but those that bound them to an ideal, whose only tangible
expression was the log court-house where they recorded the deeds for
their land or the military post that afforded them protection. At
Decatur, Illinois, one of these first court-houses still stands, and we
are told that within its walls Lincoln often pleaded causes. American
democracy could have no finer monument than this; the imagination
quickens at the thought of similar huts reared by the axes of the
pioneers to establish safeguards of law and order on new soil almost
before they had fashioned their habitations. It seemed to me that if
the Kaiser had known the spirit in which these august fields were
tamed and peopled, or the aspirations, the aims and hopes that are
represented in every farmhouse and ranch-house between the Alleghanies
and the Rockies, he would not so contemptuously have courted our
participation against him in his war for world domination.
What I am calling, for convenience, the intermediate period in the
history of the Mississippi valley, began when the rough pioneering was
over, and the sons of the first settlers came into an inheritance of
cleared land. In the Ohio valley the Civil War found the farmer at
ease; to the west and northwest we must set the date further along.
The conditions of this intermediate period may not be overlooked
in any scrutiny of the farmer of these changed and changing times.
When the cloud of the Civil War lifted and the West began asserting
itself in the industrial world, the farmer, viewing the smoke-stacks
that advertised the entrance of the nearest towns and cities into
manufacturing, became a man with a grievance, who bitterly reflected
that when rumors of “good times” reached him he saw no perceptible
change in his own fortunes or prospects, and in “bad times” he felt
himself the victim of hardship and injustice. The glory of pioneering
had passed with his father and grandfather; they had departed, leaving
him without their incentive of urgent necessity or the exultance of
conquest. There may have been some weakening of the fibre, or perhaps
it was only a lessening of the tension now that the Indians had been
dispersed and the fear of wild beasts lifted from his household.
There were always, of course, men who were pointed to as prosperous,
who for one reason or another “got ahead” when others fell behind. They
not only held their acres free of mortgage but added to their holdings.
These men were very often spoken of as “close,” or tight-fisted; in
Mr. Brand Whitlock’s phrase they were “not rich, but they had money.”
And, having money and credit, they were sharply differentiated from
their neighbors who were forever borrowing to cover a shortage. These
men loomed prominently in their counties; they took pride in augmenting
the farms inherited from pioneer fathers; they might sit in the State
legislature or even in the national Congress. But for many years the
farmer was firmly established in the mind of the rest of the world as
an object of commiseration. He occupied an anomalous position in the
industrial economy. He was a landowner without enjoying the dignity of
a capitalist; he performed the most arduous tasks without recognition
by organized labor. He was shabby, dull, and uninteresting. He drove
to town over a bad road with a load of corn, and, after selling or
bartering it, negotiated for the renewal of his mortgage and stood on
the street corner, an unheroic figure, until it was time to drive home.
He symbolized hard work, hard luck, and discouragement. The saloon, the
livery-stable, and the grocery where he did his trading were his only
loafing-places. The hotel was inhospitable; he spent no money there
and the proprietor didn’t want “rubes” or “jays” hanging about. The
farmer and his wife ate their midday meal in the farm-wagon or at a
restaurant on the “square” where the frugal patronage of farm folk was
not despised.
The type I am describing was often wasteful and improvident. The
fact that a degree of mechanical skill was required for the care of
farm-machinery added to his perplexities; and this apparatus he very
likely left out-of-doors all winter for lack of initiative to build a
shed to house it. I used to pass frequently a farm where a series of
reapers in various stages of decrepitude decorated the barn-lot, with
always a new one to heighten the contrast.
The social life of the farmer centred chiefly in the church, where on
the Sabbath day he met his neighbors and compared notes with them on
the state of the crops. Sundays on the farm I recall as days of gloom
that brought an intensification of week-day homesickness. The road
was dusty; the church was hot; the hymns were dolorously sung to the
accompaniment of a wheezy organ; the sermon was long, strongly flavored
with brimstone, and did nothing to lighten
“the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.”
The horses outside stamped noisily in their efforts to shake off the
flies. A venturous bee might invade the sanctuary and arouse hope in
impious youngsters of an attack upon the parson--a hope never realized!
The preacher’s appetite alone was a matter for humor; I once reported
a Methodist conference at which the succulence of the yellow-legged
chickens in a number of communities that contended for the next
convocation was debated for an hour. The height of the country boy’s
ambition was to break a colt and own a side-bar buggy in which to take
a neighbor’s daughter for a drive on Sunday afternoon.
Community gatherings were rare; men lived and died in the counties
where they were born, “having seen nothing, still unblest.” County
and State fairs offered annual diversion, and the more ambitious
farmers displayed their hogs and cattle, or mammoth ears of corn,
and reverently placed their prize ribbons in the family Bibles on
the centre-tables of their sombre parlors. Cheap side-shows and
monstrosities, horse-races and balloon ascensions were provided for
their delectation, as marking the ultimate height of their intellectual
interests. A characteristic “Riley story” was of a farmer with a boil
on the back of his neck, who spent a day at the State fair waiting for
the balloon ascension. He inquired repeatedly: “Has the balloon gone up
yit?” Of course when the ascension took place he couldn’t lift his head
to see the balloon, but, satisfied that it really had “gone up,” he
contentedly left for home. (It may be noted here that the new status of
the farmer is marked by an improvement in the character of amusements
offered by State-fair managers. Most of the Western States have added
creditable exhibitions of paintings to their attractions, and in
Minnesota these were last year the subject of lectures that proved to
be very popular.)
The farmer, in the years before he found that he must become a
scientist and a business man to achieve success, was the prey
of a great variety of sharpers. Tumble-down barns bristled with
lightning-rods that cost more than the structures were worth. A man
who had sold cooking-ranges to farmers once told me of the delights of
that occupation. A carload of ranges would be shipped to a county-seat
and transferred to wagons. It was the agent’s game to arrive at the
home of a good “prospect” shortly before noon, take down the old,
ramshackle cook-stove, set up the new and glittering range, and assist
the womenfolk to prepare a meal. The farmer, coming in from the fields
and finding his wife enchanted, would order a range and sign notes
for payment. These obligations, after the county had been thoroughly
exploited, would be discounted at the local bank. In this way the
farmer’s wife got a convenient range she would never have thought of
buying in town, and her husband paid an exorbitant price for it.
The farmer’s wife was, in this period to which I am referring, a poor
drudge who appeared at the back door of her town customers on Saturday
mornings with eggs and butter. She was copartner with her husband, but,
even though she might have “brought” him additional acres at marriage,
her spending-money was limited to the income from butter, eggs, and
poultry, and even this was dependent upon the generosity of the head of
the house. Her kitchen was furnished with only the crudest housewifery
apparatus; labor-saving devices reached her slowly. In busy seasons,
when there were farm-hands to cook for, she might borrow a neighbor’s
daughter to help her. Her only relief came when her own daughters
grew old enough to assist in her labors. She was often broken down, a
prey to disease, before she reached middle life. Her loneliness, the
dreary monotony of her existence, the prevailing hopelessness of never
“catching up” with her sewing and mending, often drove her insane. The
farmhouse itself was a desolate place. There is a mustiness I associate
with farmhouses--the damp stuffiness of places never reached by the
sun. With all the fresh air in the world to draw from, thousands of
farmhouses were ill-lighted and ill-ventilated, and farm sanitation was
of the most primitive order.
I have dwelt upon the intermediate period merely to heighten the
contrast with the new era--an era that finds the problem of farm
regeneration put squarely up to the farmer.
III
The new era really began with the passage of the Morrill Act, approved
July 2, 1862, though it is only within a decade that the effects of
this law upon the efficiency and the character of the farmer have been
markedly evident. The Morrill Act not only made the first provision
for wide-spread education in agriculture but lighted the way for
subsequent legislation that resulted in the elevation of the Department
of Agriculture to a cabinet bureau, the system of agriculture
experiment-stations, the co-operation of federal and State bureaus
for the diffusion of scientific knowledge pertaining to farming and
the breeding and care of live-stock, and the recent introduction of
vocational training into country schools.
[Illustration: A typical old homestead of the Middle West.
The farm on which Tecumseh was born.]
It was fitting that Abraham Lincoln, who had known the hardest farm
labor, should have signed a measure of so great importance, that
opened new possibilities to the American farmer. The agricultural
colleges established under his Act are impressive monuments to Senator
Morrill’s far-sightedness. When the first land-grant colleges were
opened there was little upon which to build courses of instruction.
Farming was not recognized as a science but was a form of hard labor
based on tradition and varied only by reckless experiments that usually
resulted in failure. The first students of the agricultural schools,
drawn largely from the farm, were discouraged by the elementary
character of the courses. Instruction in ploughing, to young men who
had learned to turn a straight furrow as soon as they could tiptoe up
to the plough-handles, was not calculated to inspire respect for “book
farming” either in students or their doubting parents.
The farmer and his household have found themselves in recent years
the object of embarrassing attentions not only from Washington,
the land-grant colleges, and the experiment-stations, but countless
private agencies have “discovered” the farmer and addressed themselves
determinedly to the amelioration of his hardships. The social surveyor,
having analyzed the city slum to his satisfaction, springs from his
automobile at the farmhouse door and asks questions of the bewildered
occupants that rouse the direst apprehensions. Sanitarians invade the
premises and recommend the most startling changes and improvements.
Once it was possible for typhoid or diphtheria to ravage a household
without any interference from the outside world; now a health officer
is speedily on the premises to investigate the old oaken bucket, the
iron-bound bucket, that hangs in the well, and he very likely ties
and seals the well-sweep and bids the farmer bore a new well, in a
spot kindly chosen for him, where the barn-lot will not pollute his
drinking-water. The questionnaire, dear to the academic investigator,
is constantly in circulation. Women’s clubs and federations thereof
ponder the plight of the farmer’s wife and are eager to hitch her
wagon to a star. Home-mission societies, alarmed by reports of the
decay of the country church, have instituted surveys to determine the
truth of this matter. The consolidation of schools, the introduction
of comfortable omnibuses to carry children to and from home, the
multiplication of country high schools, with a radical revision of the
curriculum, the building of two-story schoolhouses in place of the old
one-room affair in which all branches were taught at once, and the use
of the schoolhouse as a community centre--these changes have dealt a
blow to the long-established ideal of the red-mittened country child,
wading breast-high through snow to acquaint himself with the three
R’s and, thus fortified, enter into the full enjoyment of American
democracy. Just how Jefferson would look upon these changes and this
benignant paternalism I do not know, nor does it matter now that
American farm products are reckoned in billions and we are told that
the amount must be increased or the world will starve.
The farmer’s mail, once restricted to an occasional letter, began to be
augmented by other remembrances from Washington than the hollyhock-seed
his congressman occasionally conferred upon the farmer’s wife.
Pamphlets in great numbers poured in upon him, filled with warnings and
friendly counsel. The soil he had sown and reaped for years, in the
full confidence that he knew all its weaknesses and possibilities, he
found to be something very different and called by strange names. His
lifelong submission to destructive worms and hoppers was, he learned,
unnecessary if not criminal; there were ways of eliminating these
enemies, and he shyly discussed the subject with his neighbors.
In speaking of the farmer’s shyness I have stumbled into the field
of psychology, whose pitfalls are many. The psychologists have as
yet played their search-light upon the farm guardedly or from the
sociologist’s camp. I here condense a few impressions merely that the
trained specialist may hasten to convict me of error. The farmer of the
Middle West--the typical farmer with approximately a quarter-section
of land--is notably sensitive, timid, only mildly curious, cautious,
and enormously suspicious. (“The farmer,” a Kansas friend whispers,
“doesn’t vote his opinions; he votes his suspicions!”) In spite of the
stuffing of his rural-route box with instructive literature designed
to increase the productiveness of his acres and lighten his own toil,
he met the first overtures of the “book-l’arnin’” specialist warily,
and often with open hostility. The reluctant earth has communicated
to the farmer, perhaps in all times and in all lands, something of
its own stubbornness. He does not like to be driven; he is restive
under criticism. The county agent of the extension bureau who seeks
him out with the best intentions in the world, to counsel him in his
perplexities, must approach him diplomatically. I find in the report
of a State director of agricultural extension a discreet statement
that “the forces of this department are organized, not for purposes
of dictation in agricultural matters but for service and assistance
in working out problems pertaining to the farm and the community.”
The farmer, unaffected as he is by crowd psychology, is not easily
disturbed by the great movements and tremendous crises that rouse the
urban citizen. He reads his newspaper perhaps more thoroughly than the
city man, at least in the winter season when the distractions of the
city are greatest and farm duties are the least exacting. Surrounded by
the peace of the fields, he is not swayed by mighty events, as men are
who scan the day’s news on trains and trolleys and catch the hurried
comments of their fellow citizens as they plunge through jostling
throngs. Professor C. J. Galpin, of Wisconsin University, aptly
observes that, while the farmer trades in a village, he shares the
invisible government of a township, which “scatters and mystifies” his
community sense.
It was a matter of serious complaint that farmers responded very slowly
in the first Liberty Loan campaigns. At the second call vigorous
attempts were made through the corn belt to rouse the farmer, who had
profited so enormously by the war’s augmentation of prices. In many
cases country banks took the minimum allotment of their communities and
then sent for the farmers to come in and subscribe. The Third Loan,
however, was met in a much better spirit. The farmer is unused to the
methods by which money-raising “drives” are conducted and he resents
being told that he must do this, that, or the other thing. Townfolk are
beset constantly by demands for money for innumerable causes; there
is always a church, a hospital, a social-service house, a Y. M. C. A.
building, or some home or refuge for which a special appeal is being
made. There is a distinct psychology of generosity based largely on the
inspiration of thoroughly organized effort, where teams set forth with
a definite quota to “raise” before a fixed hour, but the farmer was
long immune from these influences.
In marked contrast with the small farmer, who wrests a scant
livelihood from the soil, is his neighbor who boasts a section or
a thousand acres, who is able to utilize the newest machinery and
to avail himself of the latest disclosures of the laboratories, to
increase his profits. One visits these large farms with admiration
for the fruitful land, the perfect equipment, the efficient method,
and the alert, wide-awake owner. He lives in a comfortable house,
often electric-lighted and “plumbed,” visits the cities, attends farm
conferences, and is keenly alive to the trend of public affairs. If the
frost nips his corn he is aware of every means by which “soft” corn may
be handled to the best advantage. He knows how many cattle and hogs
his own acres will feed, and is ready with cash to buy his neighbors’
corn and feed it to stock he buys at just the right turn of the market.
It is possible for a man to support himself and a family on eighty
acres; I have talked with men who have done this; but they “just about
get by.” The owner of a big farm, whose modern house and rich demesne
are admired by the traveller, is a valued customer of a town or city
banker; the important men of his State cultivate his acquaintance, with
resulting benefits in a broader outlook than his less-favored neighbors
enjoy. Farmers of this class are themselves usually money-lenders or
shareholders in country banks, and they watch the trend of affairs
from the view-point of the urban business man. They live closer to the
world’s currents and are more accessible and responsive to appeals of
every sort than their less-favored brethren.
But it is the small farmer, the man with the quarter-section or less,
who is the special focus of the search-light of educator, scientist,
and sociologist. During what I have called the intermediate period--the
winter of the farmer’s discontent--the politicians did not wholly
ignore him. The demagogue went forth in every campaign with special
appeals to the honest husbandman, with the unhappy effect of driving
the farmer more closely into himself and strengthening his class
sense. For the reason that the security of a democracy rests upon
the effacement to the vanishing-point of class feeling, and the
establishment of a solidarity of interests based upon a common aim
and aspiration, the effort making to dignify farming as a calling and
quicken the social instincts of the farmer’s household are matters of
national importance.
It may be said that in no other business is there a mechanism so
thoroughly organized for guarding the investor from errors of omission
or commission. I am aware of no “service” in any other field of
endeavor so excellent as that of the agricultural colleges and their
auxiliary experiment and extension branches, and it is a pleasure to
testify to the ease with which information touching the farm in all
its departments may be collected. Only the obtuse may fail these days
to profit by the newest ideas in soil-conservation, plant-nutrition,
animal-husbandry, and a thousand other subjects of vital importance
to the farmer. To test the “service” I wrote to the Department of
Agriculture for information touching a number of subjects in which my
ignorance was profound. The return mail brought an astonishing array
of documents covering all my inquiries and other literature which my
naïve questions had suggested to the Department as likely to prove
illuminative. As the extent of the government’s aid to the farmer and
stockman is known only vaguely to most laymen, I shall set down the
titles of some of these publications:
“Management of Sandy Land Farms in Northern Indiana and Southern
Michigan.”
“The Feeding of Grain Sorghums to Live Stock.”
“Prevention of Losses of Live Stock from Plant Poisoning.”
“The Feeding of Dairy Cows.”
“An Economic Study of the Farm Tractor in the Corn Belt.”
“Waste Land and Wasted Land on Farms.”
“How to Grow an Acre of Corn.”
“How to Select a Sound Horse.”
“The Chalcis Fly in Alfalfa Seed.”
“Homemade Fireless Cookers and Their Use.”
“A Method of Analyzing the Farm Business.”
“The Striped Peach Worm.”
“The Sheep-Killing Dog.”
“Food Habits of the Swallows, a Family of Valuable Native Birds.”
As most of these bulletins may be had free and for others only a
nominal price of five or ten cents is charged, it is possible to
accumulate an extensive library with a very small expenditure.
Soil-fertilization alone is the subject of an enormous literature;
the field investigator and the laboratory expert have subjected the
earth in every part of America to intensive study and their reports
are presented clearly and with a minimum use of technical terms. Many
manufacturers of implements or materials used on farms publish and
distribute books of real dignity in the advertisement of their wares. I
have before me a handsome volume, elaborately illustrated, put forth by
a Wisconsin concern, describing the proper method of constructing and
equipping a dairy-barn. To peruse this work is to be convinced that
the manger so alluringly offered really assures the greatest economy of
feeding, and the kine are so effectively photographed, so clean, and
so contented that one is impelled to an immediate investment in a herd
merely for the joy of housing it in the attractive manner recommended
by the sagacious advertiser.
Agricultural schools and State extension bureaus manifest the greatest
eagerness to serve the earnest seeker for enlightenment. “The Service
of YOUR College Brought as Near as Your Mail-Box,” is the slogan of
the Kansas State Agricultural College. Once upon a time I sought the
answer to a problem in Egyptian hieroglyphics and learned that the
only American who could speak authoritatively on that particular point
was somewhere on the Nile with an exploration party. In the field of
agriculture there is no such paucity of scholarship. The very stupidity
of a question seems to awaken pity in the intelligent, accommodating
persons who are laboring in the farmer’s behalf. Augustine Birrell
remarks that in the days of the tractarian movement pamphlets were
served upon the innocent bystander like sheriffs’ processes. In like
manner one who manifests only the tamest curiosity touching agriculture
in any of its phases will find literature pouring in upon him; and he
is distressed to find that it is all so charmingly presented that he is
beguiled into reading it!
The charge that the agricultural school is educating students away
from the farm is not substantiated by reports from representative
institutions of this character. The dean of the College of Agriculture
of the University of Illinois, Dr. Eugene Davenport, has prepared a
statement illustrative of the sources from which the students of that
institution are derived. Every county except two is represented in
the agricultural department in a registration of 1,200 students, and,
of 710 questioned, 242 are from farms; 40 from towns under 1,000; 87
from towns of 1,000 to 1,500; 262 from towns of 5,000 and up; and 79
from Chicago. Since 1900 nearly 1,000 students have completed the
agricultural course in this institution, and of this number 69 per
cent are actually living on farms and engaged in farming; 17 per cent
are teaching agriculture, or are engaged in extension work; 10 per
cent entered callings related to farming, such as veterinary surgery,
landscape-gardening, creamery-management, etc.; less than 4 per cent
are in occupations not allied with agriculture. It should be explained
that the Illinois school had only a nominal existence until seventeen
years ago. The number of students has steadily increased from 7
registrations in 1890 to 1,201 in 1916-17. At the Ohio College of
Agriculture half the freshman classes of the last three years came from
the cities, though this includes students in landscape architecture and
horticulture. In Iowa State College the reports of three years show
that 54.5 per cent of the freshmen were sons of farmers, and of the
graduates of a seven-year period (1907-1914) 34.8 are now engaged in
farming.
The opportunities open to the graduates of these colleges have been
greatly multiplied by the demand for teachers in vocational schools,
and the employment of county agents who must be graduates of a school
of agriculture or have had the equivalent in practical farm experience.
The influence of the educated farmer upon his neighbors is very marked.
They may view his methods with distrust, but when he rolls up a yield
of corn that sets a new record for fields with which they are familiar
they cannot ignore the fact that, after all, there may be something
in the idea of school-taught farming. By the time a farm boy enters
college he is sufficiently schooled in his father’s methods, and well
enough acquainted with the home acres, to appreciate fully the value of
the instruction the college offers him.
The only difference between agricultural colleges and other technical
schools is that to an unscientific observer the courses in agronomy
and its co-ordinate branches deal with vital matters that are more
interesting and appealing than those in, let us say, mechanical
engineering. If there is something that stirs the imagination in the
thought that two blades of grass may be made to grow where only one had
grown before, how much more satisfying is the assurance that an acre of
soil, properly fertilized and thoroughly tended, may double its yield
of corn; that there is a choice well worth the knowing between breeds
of beef or dairy cattle, and that there is a demonstrable difference in
the energy of foods that may be converted into pork, particularly when
there is a shortage and the government, to stimulate hog production,
fixes a minimum price (November, 1917) of $15.50 per hundredweight in
the Chicago market; and even so stabilized the price is close upon $20
in July, 1918.
[Illustration: Students of agriculture in the pageant that celebrated
the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Ohio State University.]
The equipment of these institutions includes, with the essential
laboratories, farms under cultivation, horses, cattle, sheep, and
swine of all the representative breeds. Last fall I spent two days in
the agricultural school of a typical land-grant college of the corn
belt (Purdue University), and found the experience wholly edifying.
The value of this school to the State of Indiana is incalculable.
Here the co-ordinate extension service under Professor G. I. Christie
is thoroughly systematized, and reaches every acre of land in the
commonwealth. “Send for Christie” has become a watchword among Indiana
farmers in hours of doubt or peril. Christie can diagnose an individual
farmer’s troubles in the midst of a stubborn field, and fully satisfy
the landowner as to the merit of the prescribed remedy; or he can
interest a fashionable city audience in farm problems. He was summoned
to Washington a year ago to supervise farm-labor activities, and is a
member of the recently organized war policies board.[C] The extension
service in all the corn and wheat States is excellent; it must be in
capable hands, for the farmer at once becomes suspicious if the State
agent doesn’t show immediately that he knows his business.
The students at Purdue struck me as more attentive and alert than those
I have observed from time to time in literature classes of schools
that stick to the humanities. In an entomology class, where I noted
the presence of one young woman, attention was riveted upon a certain
malevolent grasshopper, the foe of vegetation and in these years of
anxious conservation an enemy of civilization. That a young woman
should elect a full course in agronomy and allied branches seemed to
me highly interesting, and, to learn her habitat in the most delicate
manner possible, I asked for a census of the class, to determine how
many students were of farm origin. The young lady so deeply absorbed in
the grasshopper was, I found, a city girl. Women, it should be noted,
are often very successful farmers and stock-breeders. They may be
seen at all representative cattle-shows inspecting the exhibits with
sophistication and pencilling notes in the catalogues.
To sit in the pavilion of one of these colleges and hear a lecture
on the judging of cattle is to be persuaded that much philosophy
goes into the production of a tender, juicy beefsteak or a sound,
productive milch cow. In a class that I visited a Polled Angus steer
and a shorthorn were on exhibition; the instructor might have been a
sculptor, conducting a class in modelling, from the nice points of
“line,” the distribution of muscle and fat, that he dilated upon. He
invited questions, which led to a discussion in which the whole class
participated. At the conclusion of this lecture a drove of swine was
driven in that a number of young gentlemen might practise the fine
art of “judging” this species against an approaching competitive
meeting with a class from another school. In these days of multiplying
farm-implements and tractors, the farmer is driven perforce to know
something of mechanics. Time is precious and the breaking down of a
harvester may be calamitous if the owner must send to town for some
one to repair it. These matters are cared for in the farm-mechanics
laboratories where instruction is offered in the care, adjustment, and
repair of all kinds of farm-machinery. While in the summer of 1917 only
40,000 tractors were in use on American farms, it is estimated that by
the end of the current year the number will have increased to 200,000,
greatly minimizing the shortage in men and horses. The substitution
of gasolene for horse-power is only one of the many changes in farm
methods attributable to the imperative demand for increased production
of foodstuffs. Whitman may have foreseen the coming of the tractor when
he wrote:
“Well-pleased America, thou beholdest,
Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters;
The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements”;
for “crawling monster” happily describes the tractor.
The anxiety to serve, to accommodate the instruction to special needs,
is illustrated in the length of courses offered, which include a
week’s intensive course in midwinter designed for farmers, two-year
and four-year courses, and post-graduate work. Men well advanced in
years attend the midwinter sessions, eager to improve their methods
in a business they have followed all their lives. They often bring
their wives with them, to attend classes in dairying, poultry-raising,
or home economics. It is significant of the new movement in farming
that at the University of Wisconsin, an institution whose services to
American agriculture are inestimable, there is a course in agricultural
journalism, “intended,” the catalogue recites, “to be of special
service to students who will engage in farming or who expect to be
employed in station work or in some form of demonstration or extension
service and who therefore may have occasion to write for publication
and certainly will have farm produce and products to sell. To these
ends the work is very largely confined to studies in agricultural
writing.”
IV
The easing of the farmer’s burdens, through the development
of labor-saving machinery, and the convenience of telephones,
trolley-lines, and the cheap automobile that have vastly improved his
social prospects, has not overcome a growing prejudice against close
kinship with the soil. We have still to deal with the loneliness and
the social barrenness that have driven thousands of the children of
farms to the cities. The son of a small farmer may make a brilliant
record in an agricultural college, achieve the distinction of admission
to the national honorary agricultural fraternity (the Alpha Zeta, the
little brother of the Phi Beta Kappa), and still find the old home
crippling and stifling to his awakened social sense.
There is general agreement among the authorities that one of the chief
difficulties in the way of improvement is the lack of leadership in
farm communities. The farmer is not easily aroused, and he is disposed
to resent as an unwarranted infringement upon his constitutional rights
the attempts of outsiders to meddle with his domestic affairs. He
has found that it is profitable to attend institutes, consult county
agents, and peruse the literature distributed from extension centres,
but the invasion of his house is a very different matter. Is he not the
lord of his acres, an independent, self-respecting citizen, asking no
favors of society? Does he not ponder well his civic duty and plot the
destruction of the accursed middleman, his arch-enemy? The benevolently
inclined who seek him out to persuade him of the error of his ways
in any particular are often received with scant courtesy. He must be
“shown,” not merely “told.” The agencies now so diligently at work to
improve the farmer’s social status understand this and the methods
employed are wisely tempered in the light of abundant knowledge of just
how much crowding the farmer will stand.
[Illustration: A feeding-plant at “Whitehall,” the farm of Edwin S.
Kelly, near Springfield, Ohio.]
Nothing is so essential to his success as the health of his household;
yet inquiries, more particularly in the older States of the Mississippi
valley, lead to the conclusion that there is a dismaying amount of
chronic invalidism on farms. A physician who is very familiar with farm
life declares that “all farmers have stomach trouble,” and this obvious
exaggeration is rather supported by Dr. John N. Hurty, secretary of the
Indiana State Board of Health, who says that he finds in his visits to
farmhouses that the cupboards are filled with nostrums warranted
to relieve the agonies of poor digestion. Dr. Hurty, who has probably
saved more lives and caused more indignation in his twenty years of
public service than any other Hoosier, has made a sanitary survey of
four widely separated Indiana counties. In Blackford County, where
1,374 properties were inspected, only 15 per cent of the farmhouses
were found to be sanitary. Site, ventilation, water-supply, the
condition of the house, and the health of its inmates entered into the
scoring. In Ohio County, where 441 homes were visited, 86 per cent
were found to be insanitary. The tuberculosis rate for this county was
found to be 25 per cent higher than that of the State. In Scott County
97.6 per cent of the farms were pronounced insanitary, and here the
tuberculosis rate is 48.3 per cent higher than that of the State. In
Union County, where only 2.3 per cent of the farms were found to be
sanitary, the average score did not rise above 45 per cent on site,
ventilation, and health. Here the tuberculosis death-rate was 176.3
in 100,000, against the State rate of 157. In all these counties the
school population showed a decrease.
It should be said that in the communities mentioned, old ones as
history runs in this region, many homes stand practically unaltered
after fifty or seventy-five years of continuous occupancy. Thousands
of farmers who would think it a shameless extravagance to install
a bathtub boast an automobile. A survey by Professor George H. von
Tungeln, of Iowa College, of 227 farms in two townships of northern
Iowa, disclosed 62 bathtubs, 98 pianos, and 124 automobiles. The number
of bathtubs reported by the farmers of Ohio is so small that I shrink
from stating it.
Here, again, we may be sure that the farmer is not allowed to dwell
in slothful indifference to the perils of uncleanliness. On the heels
of the sanitarian and the sociologist come the field agents of the
home-economics departments of the meddlesome land-grant colleges,
bent upon showing him a better way of life. I was pondering the
plight of the bathless farmhouse when a document reached me showing
how a farmhouse may enjoy running water, bathroom, gas, furnace, and
two fireplaces for an expenditure of $723.97. One concrete story is
better than many treatises, and I cheerfully cite, as my authority,
“Modernizing an Old Farm House,” by Mrs. F. F. Showers, included
among the publications of the Wisconsin College of Agriculture. The
home-economics departments do not wait for the daughters of the farm
to come to them, but seek them out with the glad tidings that greater
ease and comfort are within their reach if only their fathers can be
made to see the light. In many States the extension agents organize
companies of countrywomen and carry them junketing to modern farmhouses.
Turning to Nebraska, whose rolling cornfields are among the noblest
to be encountered anywhere, home-demonstration agents range the
commonwealth organizing clubs, which are federated where possible to
widen social contacts, better-babies conferences, and child-welfare
exhibits. The Community Welfare Assembly, as conducted in Kansas, has
the merit of offering a varied programme--lectures on agriculture and
home economics, civics, health, and rural education by specialists,
moving pictures, community music, and folk games and stories for the
children. In Wisconsin the rural-club movement reaches every part of
the State, and a State law grants the use of schoolhouses for community
gatherings. Seymour, Indiana, boasts a Farmer’s Club, the gift of a
citizen, with a comfortably appointed house, where farmers and their
families may take their ease when in town.
The organization of boys’ and girls’ clubs among farm youth is
a feature of the vocational-training service offered under the
Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and already the reports of its progress are
highly interesting. These organizations make possible the immediate
application of the instruction in agriculture and home economics
received in the schools. In Indiana more than 25,000 boys and girls
were enlisted last year in such club projects as the cultivation of
corn, potatoes, and garden vegetables, canning, sewing, and home-craft,
and the net profit from these sources was $105,100. In my prowlings
nothing has delighted me more than the discovery of the Pig Club. This
is one of Uncle Sam’s many schemes for developing the initiative and
stimulating the ambition of farm children. It might occur to the city
boy, whose acquaintance with pork is limited to his breakfast bacon,
that the feeding of a pig is not a matter worthy of the consideration
of youth of intelligence and aspiration. Uncle Sam, however, holds the
contrary opinion. From a desk in the Department of Agriculture he has
thrown a rosy glamour about the lowly pig. Country bankers, properly
approached and satisfied of the good character and honorable intentions
of applicants, will advance money to farm boys to launch them upon
pig-feeding careers. My heart warms to Douglas Byrne, of Harrison
County, Indiana, who, under the guidance of a club supervisor, fed 17
hogs with a profit of $99.30. Another young Hoosier, Elmer Pearce, of
Vanderburgh County, fed 2 pigs that made a daily gain of 1.38 pounds
for four months, and sold them at a profit of $12.36. We learn from
the official report that this young man’s father warned him that the
hogs he exercised his talents upon would make no such gains as were
achieved. Instead of spanking the lad for his perverseness, as would
have been the case in the olden golden days, this father made him the
ruler over 30 swine. There are calf and pig clubs for girls, and a
record has been set for Indiana by twelve-year-old Pauline Hadley, of
Mooresville, who cared for a Poland China hog for 110 days, increasing
its weight from 65 to 256 pounds, and sold it at a profit of $20.08.
The farmer of yesterday blundered through a year and at the end
had a very imperfect idea of his profits and losses. He kept no
accounts; if he paid his taxes and the interest on the omnipresent
mortgage, and established credit for the winter with his grocer, he
was satisfied. Uncle Sam, thoroughly aroused to the importance of
increasing the farmer’s efficiency, now shows him how to keep simple
accounts and returns at the end of the season to analyze the results.
(Farm-management is the subject of many beguiling pamphlets; it seems
incredible that any farmer should blindly go on wasting time and
money when his every weakness is anticipated and prescribed for by
the Department of Agriculture and its great army of investigators and
counsellors!)
If there is little cheerful fiction dealing with farm life, its absence
is compensated for by the abundance of “true stories” of the most
stimulating character, to be found in the publications of the State
agricultural extension bureaus. Professor Christie’s report of the
Indiana Extension Service for last year recites the result of three
years’ observation of a southern Indiana farm of 213 acres. In 1914 the
owner cleared $427 above interest on his capital, in addition to his
living. This, however, was better than the average for the community,
which was a cash return of $153. This man had nearly twice as much
land as his neighbors, carried more live-stock, and his crop yields
were twice as great as the community average. His attention was called
to the fact that he was investing $100 worth of feed and getting back
only $82 in his live-stock account. He was expending 780 days in the
care of his farm and stock, which the average corn-belt farmer could
have managed with 605 days of labor. Acting on the advice of the
Extension Department, he added to his live-stock, built a silo, changed
his feeding ration, and increased his live-stock receipts to $154 per
$100 of feed. The care of the additional live-stock through the winter
resulted in a better reward for his labor and the amount accredited
to labor income for the year was $1,505. The third year he increased
his live-stock and poultry, further improved the feeding ration, and
received $205 per $100 of feed. By adding to the conveniences of his
barn, he was able to cut down his expenditure for hired labor; or, to
give the exact figures, he reduced the amount expended in this way from
$515 to $175. His labor income for the third year was $3,451. “Labor
income,” as the phrase is employed in farm bookkeeping, is the net sum
remaining after the farm-owner has paid all business expenses of the
farm and deducted a fair interest on the amount invested in his plant.
I have mentioned the 80-acre farm as affording a living for a family;
but there is no ignoring the testimony of farm-management surveys,
covering a wide area, that this unit is too small to yield the
owner the best results from his labor. In a Nebraska survey it is
demonstrated that farms of from 200 to 250 acres show better average
returns than those of larger or smaller groups, but rainfall, soil
conditions, and the farmer’s personal qualifications are factors in all
such studies that make generalizations difficult. A diversified farm of
160 acres requires approximately 3,000 hours’ labor a year. Forty-five
acres of corn, shocked and husked, consume 270 days of labor; like
acreages of oats and clover, 90 and 45 days respectively; care of
live-stock and poultry, 195 days. In summer a farmer often works twelve
or fourteen hours a day, while in winter, with only his stock to look
after, his labor is reduced to three or four hours.
The Smith-Hughes Act (approved February, 1917) appropriates
annually sums which will attain, in 1926, a maximum of $3,000,000
“for co-operation with the States in the promotion of education in
agriculture and the trades and industries, and in the preparation of
teachers of vocational subjects, the sums to be allotted to the States
in the proportion which their rural population bears to the total rural
population of the United States.” Washington is only the dynamic centre
of inspiration and energy in the application of the laws that make so
generous provision for the farmer’s welfare. The States must enter into
a contract to defray their share of the expense and put the processes
into operation.
There was something of prophecy in the message of President Roosevelt
(February 9, 1909) transmitting to Congress the report of his Country
Life Commission. He said: “Upon the development of country life rests
ultimately our ability, by methods of farming requiring the highest
intelligence, to continue to feed and clothe the hungry nations; to
supply the city with fresh blood, clean bodies, and clear brains that
can endure the terrific strain of modern life; we need the development
of men in the open country, who will be in the future, as in the past,
the stay and strength of the nation in time of war, and its guiding and
controlling spirit in time of peace.” The far-reaching effect of the
report, a remarkably thorough and searching study of farm conditions,
is perceptible in agencies and movements that were either suggested by
it or that were strengthened by its authoritative utterances.
V
Much has been written of the decline of religion in rural communities,
and melancholy statistics have been adduced as to the abandonment of
churches. But here, as in the matter of farm efficiency and kindred
rural problems, vigorous attempts are making to improve conditions.
“The great spiritual needs of the country community just at present
are higher personal and community ideals,” the Country Life Commission
reported. “Rural people have need to have an aspiration for the highest
possible development of the community. There must be an ambition on
the part of the people themselves constantly to progress in all those
things that make the community life wholesome, satisfying, educative,
and complete. There must be a desire to develop a permanent environment
for the country boy and girl, of which they will become passionately
fond. As a pure matter of education, the countryman must learn to love
the country and to have an intellectual appreciation of it.” In this
connection I wish that every farm boy and girl in America might read
“The Holy Earth,” by L. H. Bailey (a member of the commission), a
book informed with a singular sweetness and nobility, and fit to be
established as an auxiliary reading-book in every agricultural college
in America.
There is abundant evidence that the religious bodies are not
indifferent to the importance of vitalizing the country church, and
here the general socializing movement is acting as a stimulus. Not only
have the churches, in federal and State conferences, set themselves
determinedly to improve the rural parish, but the matter has been the
subject of much discussion by educational and sociological societies
with encouraging gains. The wide-spread movement for the consolidation
of country schools suggests inevitably the combination of country
parishes, assuring greater stability and making possible the employment
of permanent ministers of a higher intellectual type, capable of
exercising that intelligent local leadership which all commentators on
the future of the farm agree is essential to progress.
By whatever avenue the rural problem is approached it is apparent
that it is not sufficient to persuade American youth of the economic
advantages of farming over urban employments, but that the new
generation must be convinced in very concrete ways that country life
affords generous opportunities for comfort and happiness, and that
there are compensations for all it lacks. The farmer of yesterday,
strongly individualistic and feeling that the world’s rough hand was
lifted against him, has no longer an excuse for holding aloof from the
countless forces that are attempting to aid him and give his children a
better chance in life. No other figure in the American social picture
is receiving so much attention as the farmer. A great treasure of money
is expended annually by State and federal governments to increase
his income, lessen his labor, educate his children, and bring health
and comfort to his home. If he fails to take advantage of the vast
machinery that is at work in his behalf, it is his own fault; if his
children do not profit by the labors of the State to educate them, the
sin is at his own door. In his business perplexities he has but to
telephone to a county agent or to the extension headquarters of his
State to receive the friendly counsel of an expert. If his children
are dissatisfied and long for variety and change, it is because he has
concealed from them the means by which their lives may be quickened and
brightened.
[Illustration: Judging graded shorthorn herds at the American Royal
Live Stock Show in Kansas City.]
With the greatest self-denial I refrain from concluding this chapter
with a ringing peroration in glorification of farm life. From a desk
on the fifteenth floor of an office-building, with an outlook across a
smoky, clanging industrial city, I could do this comfortably and with
an easy conscience. But the scientist has stolen farming away from the
sentimentalist and the theorist. Farming, I may repeat, is a business,
the oldest and the newest in the world. No year passes in which its
methods and processes are not carried nearer to perfection. City boys
now about to choose a vocation will do well to visit an agricultural
college and extension plant, or, better still, a representative
corn-belt farm, before making the momentous decision. Perhaps the
thousands of urban lads who this year volunteered to aid the farmers
as a patriotic service will be persuaded that the soil affords
opportunities not lightly to be passed by. No one can foretell the vast
changes that will be precipitated when the mighty war is ended; but one
point is undebatable: the world, no matter how low its fortunes may
sink, must have bread and meat. Tremendous changes and readjustments
are already foreshadowed; but in all speculations the productiveness of
the American farm will continue to be a factor of enormous importance.
A wide-spread absorption of land by large investors, the increase of
tenantry, and the passing of the farm family are possibilities of the
future not to be overlooked by those who have at heart the fullest and
soundest development of American democracy. For every 100 acres of
American land now under cultivation there are about 375 acres untilled
but susceptible of cultivation. Here is a chance for American boys of
the best fibre to elect a calling that more and more demands trained
intelligence. All things considered, the rewards of farming average
higher than those in any other occupation, and the ambitious youth,
touched with the new American passion for service, for a more perfect
realization of the promise of democracy, will find in rural communities
a fallow field ready to his hand.