A Farmer Counts His Blessings

I

I AM afraid there are a good many people who, if their opinion were asked, would be unwilling to admit that the farmer had any particular blessings to count. The farmer himself would surely not be likely to take an optimistic view of his own affairs. Not only has he had personal experience with this game called farming, but, in addition, he has for years been reading the papers and listening to speeches setting forth his miserable and undone condition, so that it is wonderfully easy for him to feel very sorry for himself, and possibly to reverse Dr. Coué’s famous formula by murmuring, ‘Every day in every way I ’m growing worse and worse.’

Nor is the business man inclined to take a more rosy view of the delights of agriculture. Of course it is true that many men in their less practical and more sentimental moments will confess to a rather undefined wish that somehow, sometime, they too might turn into farmers. This is explainable by the fact that almost none of us is more than two or three generations removed from the furrow, and there doubtless remains a genuine pull of hereditary habits and memories drawing us back to the land. It is like hunting. Time was when stern necessity compelled men to hunt for a living, and now after many generations the old instinct is so strong that every year, when the open season comes around, millions of men leave their usual tasks, don cap and hunting coat and leggings and flannel shirt, and hie themselves to field and wood, there to enact a sort of ritualistic symbolism, commemorative of days long past and almost forgotten. This revival of the chase belongs to the same class of phenomena that motivates the house dog when he revolves two or three times before he lies down in front of the living-room fire, thus testifying to his biological inheritance from those far-off wolfish ancestors who, in like fashion, turned themselves about to make a nest in the grass.

I suppose it is by just such atavistic memories that we may explain the fact that many, perhaps most, men dream in rather vague ways of a time when they will go to the land. Indeed, men commonly signalize business success by buying a country home or an estate and indulging in the pastime of playing at farming. Doing this is equivalent to a formal announcement that they have, economically speaking, ‘arrived.’ Still, as I say, these agricultural fancies assail men, particularly in their more romantic and less practical moments. Fortunately, in most instances they are content to gratify these bucolic yearnings with such innocent and inexpensive diversions as reading seedsmen’s catalogues and subscribing to Country Life in America. Probably in his everyday thinking the city man is inclined to be a bit hardboiled — more so than he is willing to admit. Down in his heart he considers the farmer a very praiseworthy and convenient fixture in the scheme of things. He may regard him tolerantly as a sort of Brother to the Ox, but he is glad that the farmer sticks to his job without too much complaint, and that he seems on the whole to be fairly well content in the lowly estate whereunto God hath called him.

Once in a long while the farmer may get the opportunity to make the retort courteous. My friend William Amoss, of Maryland, is a Quaker and a farmer. Incidentally his family has tilled that particular bit of Harford County for more than two hundred years — almost from the days of Leonard Calvert. With that sort of background, even a Quaker is not much inclined to keep quiet when someone is making disrespectful remarks about this business of farming. Once, a good many years ago, when Amoss was still a young lad, he paid a visit to a cousin in New York, and this cousin was a relative of Charles Broadway Rouss and had the run of his house. Boylike, the two lads went there one night just as the famous merchant was dining, surrounded by such luxury as the Maryland farm boy had never before met with.

Desiring to make conversation, Mr. Rouss said, ‘Young man, what is your business?’

‘My father is a farmer,’was the reply.

‘H-m — a farmer. You can make no money at that.’

The young nonconformist stoutly answered, ‘Yes, I know he does n’t make much money; but we’ve got clothes enough to keep warm, and we’ve got lots to eat, and we sleep awfully well at night, and we don’t have to worry.’

Back came the reply, ‘Well, well, well, I do declare. I never thought of that. Sit down and have some dinner.’ I think it will be granted that in this tilt the honors remained with the boy.

II

Now, I cannot close my eyes to the fact that this business of mine has never contributed to that class whom a very picturesque President of the United States once held up to public execration as ‘malefactors of great wealth.’ Only here and there, once in a great while, are we permitted to be enrolled among those who pay income taxes, and then only in the lowest brackets. Of course a casual reading of Who's Who in America might cause one to jump to the conclusion that the only way to become a great man is to choose a farm, or at least the country, for one’s birthplace. In a word, it appears that a farm is the best possible breeding ground for great men, but it seems to be necessary to turn them over to the city for development. I remember hearing a rather prominent figure in the official political life of New York in the rôle of an after-dinner orator. Among the pleasant platitudes which are a part of such speeches he boasted that it had been his happy fortune in life to be born on a farm. ‘But,’ he added with a chuckle, ‘I left it just as soon as I reached years of discretion.’ I suppose the orthodox rule for attaining a large place in the world runs something like this: ‘Arrange or contrive in some way or other to have yourself born on a farm, but also see to it that by no possible mischance do you remain there.’

I take it that the reason why the farm-bred boy so frequently comes eventually to sit in the seats of the mighty lies fundamentally in his Spartan training. Reared in that school, he learns to get up early when it would be more agreeable to remain in bed. He knows what it is to weed onions or pick up potatoes when he would prefer to go to the ball game, and, rather pathetically perhaps, he comes to esteem the small thin silver coin of the realm as something to be regarded with respect when possessed, and to be parted with only after mature consideration. Possibly there is something rather pitiful in this, because too many farm boys find boyhood so full of tasks that they miss the carefree joyousness of life which ought to be the birthright of every child; none the less it can hardly be gainsaid that this sort of training stands a boy in good stead when he goes out to measure himself against the great world of men. Patient industry, economy, and a sober Puritan outlook on life are old-fashioned virtues — easier to extol perhaps than to practise — which have never lost their value in the game of life.

We are fond of remarking that the sweeping social and economic changes of recent years — notably the wide contact made possible by the automobile and the environment of the centralized school — have suddenly taken the farm boy out of what was formerly a distinct social caste with different training and ideals. I think this is so, and on the whole I am glad. I question, however, whether the changes have been wholly for good, and I wonder whether in coming days this farm boy will continue to make his former contribution to social leadership.

In our thinking it seems to be casually regarded as a self-evident truth that, whatever may be the pleasures and compensations of life on the land, the farmer’s economic reward is adjusted to a lower level than that of the industrial world. The obvious inquiry, then, is, ’Why should anybody continue to farm?’ Even so, there are more than six million heads of families in this United States who, if asked their occupation, would describe themselves as farmers. Many of them, of course, are such because, by heredity or environment, they are tied to the land and have not courage or initiative to escape; but I am convinced that there are a multitude of genuinely farmminded folk willing to pay the price for the sake of being their own boss.

This quality of farm-mindedness is not a matter of birth or training. I doubt not there are plenty of folk in, say, New York City who will never get north of 125th Street and nevertheless will continue to daydream of green fields and orchards and cows, just as there are farm-bred girls whose conception of the good life is centred around certain small cubicles in an apartment house with a movie Palace of Delight around the corner. I may say also that I have met, now and then, a woman born to the big town who by some strange mischance has married a farmer and come to live on a remote farm, and apparently has lived a wonderfully happy life amid her pots and pans and garden and hen yard. Perhaps this is so because she was born fundamentally farm-minded. A more romantic explanation would be that it was a case of ’all for love, or the world well lost.’

III

It is a melancholy reflection that our two or three notable sunbursts of agricultural prosperity seem to have been associated with great wars. More than a hundred years ago the Napoleonic Wars brought about an inflation of agricultural prices which dazzled the tenant farmer of England and was strongly reflected in America. My father used to tell me of the unbelievable prices which accompanied our Civil War, and I listened with a feeling of wonder and envy, but felt sure that they would never again be equaled. These prices were exceeded, however, in the fantastic quotations during the latter part of the World War and the year and a half thereafter. Among the dizzy happenings of that period I remember selling the hide of a farmslaughtered cow for forty-three cents a pound, and deacon (newborn calf) skins for five dollars. Last winter I sold a similar cowhide for one and a half cents a pound, and deacon hides for thirty-five cents.

When I count my blessings, I include the fact that this period did n’t last long. Indeed, it came suddenly to an end in the early summer of 1920. We farm folk seem to have been an object of public solicitude and governmental care ever since. But we had our little day. We have lived.

I count it as a blessing that this hectic, unreal, short-lived, so-called prosperity blew up before we had any real boom in Eastern land. It has been a long time since the lands of our old Northeast have been in good repute either as security for loans or as an investment. It was different in the Corn Belt. There, lands were good at the bank, and men speculatively inclined had been buying land for what was deemed the inevitable upward trend. Land had been going up notably all during those quietly, modestly prosperous years which preceded the World War, and when the war and high prices came it went up like a rocket. There is no question that the very worst and most pitiful cases of economic woe in the Middle West have resulted from buying land during the flush times and agreeing to pay impossible prices. During the heartbreaking years since then, the purchaser, regardless of anything that he might do, has seen his equity extinguished by the decline in price. On the other hand, our Eastern lands, never having been pushed to high prices, did not have far to fall.

In a general way it is true that it was always the best lands whose value was unreasonably inflated and where recent economic distress has been most acute. This is not to be construed as an endorsement of or plea for poor agricultural land. As a matter of fact, we still continue to farm millions of acres of so-called land that ought never to have been cleared in the first place, and should now be allowed to revert to the wilderness as rapidly as possible. Let it be said in passing, however, that this reversion process, before it is completed, does entail some very difficult social problems, such as the maintenance of the functions of church, school, and local government in regions which are almost but not quite abandoned.

I count it as another of my blessings that in these uncertain times we farm folk have a job. It may not be a wellpaid job, and many would insist that it is not a pleasant one; but at least it has the virtue of permanence. I am rather thrilled by the fact that, at a time when statisticians say that American business is operating at hardly more than 60 per cent of its normal rate, this great industry of which I am a part continues to carry on at about the same rate that has characterized it for a dozen years past. We have taken big wage cuts, and enforced economies have led to a small reduction of the labor force, but the hours have not been reduced and the total output is normal. When, a little later, we shall have the final estimates of agricultural production for 1931, we shall find that the American farmer has produced just about the same amount of wheat and corn and cotton and meats — and all the other things by which men live — as he did in the boom year of 1929. Values may have been cut in half, but — incurable optimists that we are — we still carry on and still hope for better things next year.

I suppose farming is absolutely the most unregulated and bitterly competitive of any of our major industries. I assume that most industries try to maintain some sort of coöperation and price understanding among themselves (always within the law, of course). But in agriculture the units are so small and their numbers so vast that any really effective organization or closely knit coöperation seems impossible. Of rather crude efforts to secure some control of prices we have had a plenty. Sometimes among certain localized groups a certain measure of organization has been secured. There are some eighty thousand dairymen who live on the New York Milk Shed, and whose potential outlet for their product is the liquid milk trade of the area. Persistent high-pressure efforts to bring these eighty thousand dairymen together into one marketing organization, the Dairymen’s League, Inc., has succeeded in enrolling about 50 per cent of their number within that rather iron-bound organization. The League, with a peak turnover of about eighty million dollars a year, may fairly insist that it represents Big Business in Agriculture. Its supporters will tell you that it dominates the New York market and determines basic prices. Those individualists outside will tell you that it merely follows quotations, and that it accomplishes nothing to justify the operation of its intricate and ponderous set-up. With an effort to maintain a judicial attitude and an open mind, I have never been able to come to any positive conclusions as to its usefulness.

IV

It seems to be in times like these that agriculture makes the best possible showing. The rural sociologist has long loved to expand upon the consequences growing out of a steadily declining rural population, and we folk on the spot have been rather disconcerted by the realization of what it must ultimately mean. It seems evident that temporarily the tide not only has been arrested, but is actually running in the other direction. In this old Northeast, at least, I think it can be shown that there are more people living in the country than there were two years ago. Here are two different happenings which indicate the trend.

In a neighboring township is a ruraldelivery mail route of about twentyfour miles which in past years has included some unoccupied farms and many vacant houses. This winter I am told that somebody is living in every habitable house. These are not people who have turned farmers or permanent country dwellers, but they represent folk who have moved to the country because rents are either nominal or free, and fuel is available at very little more than the labor of cutting. It is most unfortunate that we should have this sort of forced migration, but it indicates that in time of stress the country can take up considerable economic slack.

Another example of how people are turning back toward the land is this. Very recently I talked at length with the president of one of our twelve Federal Land Banks. He told me that in these days, when there is every reason to suppose that no one would wish to buy anything, — least of all, perhaps, land, — there is really almost a flood of inquiries regarding farms. What it means is just this: that now a lot of people are taking stock of life, and have concluded that while there is very little money on the farm, there are always at least food and shelter and fuel. He also told me another thing from which I derived a good deal of satisfaction. He said that right now, in the period when agriculture is passing through this tremendous deflation, there are comparatively few defaulted payments. Somehow or other the great mass of borrowers are managing to dig up the money to pay their interest and amortization charges. This judgment was based on the bank’s records concerning some twelve thousand different farm loans. He says that the reason for this is largely a moral one. He believes that the farmer, above the average of the rest of the world, labors under the idea that when a debt is owing the only thing to do is to pay it. This is an old-fashioned, primitive conception of duty which I am glad to believe is still especially characteristic of our old-fashioned farm people.

In passing, it is interesting to note that this March the 4 ½ per cent Federal Land Bank bonds were selling, for the different maturities, for from 83 to 98¾ — surely an unusual price in these times for a security that, in its last analysis, depends solely upon the good faith and courage of many thousands of poor farmers whose idea of prosperity seems to be a little farm of a hundred or two acres, unencumbered with debt. In a word, we seem in the aggregate to enjoy rather gilt-edged credit, and for this also I give thanks.

V

As has often been remarked, farming is not only a business — it is a mode of life as well. The farm is at once the home and the factory. In this respect farming is still in an earlier era of the world. In times like these the farmer can revert to the sustenance type of agriculture. Here in New York State, a hundred years ago, the average farmer lived almost wholly from within his own fence lines. His economic system was one of barter. He grew his own wheat, and it was ground to flour in the local mill. His field of flint corn furnished samp and supawn and johnnycake. There were sweets from his own beehives and from his maplesugar bush. He ate hugely of beef and pork, and of mutton if he cared for it, and the cow that furnished the corned beef also yielded a hide that was tanned in the local tannery and made into shoes for the family by the neighborhood cobbler. On every well-ordered farm there were a flock of sheep and a plot of flax, and in every farm kitchen there were the great spinning wheel for wool, the little spinning wheel for flax, and the barn-frame loom on which the homespun yarn was wrought into thick and honest cloth. All this is hardly a hundred years removed. The farmer of 1832 was not primarily interested in prices. He was interested in abundant crops because that meant plenty for everyone and plenty to barter with the local craftsmen for the things he could not produce on his own farm or within his farmhouse walls. His was not a commercial agriculture, but rather one of sustenance.

I repeat, then, that in those days farming was not a commercial venture, but a mode of life. If the farmer of a century ago had been called upon to live through a great world-wide depression, he would scarcely have learned of its existence. As news of it filtered through to him, he would hardly have changed the even tenor of his ways. He feared flood and drought and hail and frost and grasshoppers, but he did not worry himself concerning the business cycle.

My own father on this farm lived very much closer to this era than I do. He ate the home-baked loaf from his own wheat, and the buckwheat cakes came from grain grown on his own hillsides. Down cellar were incredible amounts of salt pork and corned beef, and the smokehouse hung full of hams and bacon and smoked beef. My own mother dried apples and plums and berries and corn, and put up great quantities of canned fruit. She cleaned the tripe of the fat cow and made ‘roletje’ (phonetic spelling), and the autumnal butchering furnished ‘souse’ and liverwurst. Always it was supposed that there would be ‘old’ ham to fry until the ‘new’ was ready to use. I am glad to say that we still cure some ham and bacon, but there is not nearly as much of it as in the old days.

I am only sixty years old, — hardly senile enough to write the ‘Recollections of a Graybeard,’ — but I remember with considerable satisfaction that candles from the tallow of the cow had a good deal of a place in my youthful environment, and I positively swell with pride over the fact that until fairly recent years we made our own soft soap from the wood ashes accumulated in the kitchen stove. In fact, down cellar still stands the long wooden trough in which the soap was kept. My memory thus goes back and links me to many features of the Homespun Age, and only two generations would carry back to the days when this farm was a wholly self-contained, self-sufficient agricultural and economic unit.

Now, what I wish to call attention to is just this: on the surface of things the farmer appears to have come a long way from his bygone past, but not so far that he cannot return if it should be necessary. He seems even now to have started a bit on the back track. The Grange League-Federation Exchange is a coöperative farm organization supplying cattle feed and bread flour to many thousands of New York State farmers. An official of this concern told me that the sales of flour to farmers have doubled during the past year. In other words, almost purely as a measure of economy, the home-baked loaf is returning. If times get hard enough, the farmer can go much further in the same direction. The average farmer on the typical family-sized farm is a singularly resourceful individual. He is a hardy perennial and almost impossible to kill. If worst comes to worst, he can put off painting the barn and get along without some piece of agricultural machinery he had planned to buy, and drive the old car a couple of years longer, and so come through. There may be an appalling scarcity of cash money, but there will not be starvation.

Whatever may be the farmer’s state of mind west of the Mississippi River, I am thankful to say that here in the East he is not expecting the Federal Farm Board or any other product of legislation to save him. He expects to live though till spring without asking for charity, and in the coming better and brighter days, when is held the roll call of men and institutions, the farmer will be present to answer, ‘Here.’ For this assurance I give thanks.