You Can't Escape Into Farming
I
WE are farmers in eastern Pennsylvania. Once we lived in cities and worked there. But let me make it clear right away that to me there is no general solution for anyone confronted by the complexities and confusions of our modern society in this movement from the city to the land. Our friends visit us in the spring and see our wide fields where grain is sprouting, and a kind of longing overtakes them for a life which seems impossible in the midst of the high tempo and complicated standards of urban society. But the problem is not as simple as it appears. Beulah and I have lived on our farm for ten years and have put into it not only work but thought. We do not think the answers are easy to give. But there are answers, and they do not lie on the surface of things.
We were young people of the war and post-war years, confused, set adrift from old moorings, undoubtedly matured somewhat by our experiences. She had come from the North, I from the South; she a child of the country, I of the city. Behind us there were years of the army, of civilian relief work with the Friends in France, Germany, and Russia; of business, a strange episode in factory and office; of teaching; and of a journey, a young man’s search for himself perhaps, which took him ultimately around the world in the years after the war.
In 1928 we married and chose to farm. And why? Perhaps I can be more articulate now than then. I think the dislocations of the time in which we had grown up had caused dislocations in ourselves, uncertainties, a desire to find deeper roots. To farm seemed to offer a life, not merely the watertight compartment of earning a living. It had the unassailable economic basis of the production of more than we used of a fundamental necessity, food. And since the confusions of our world seemed rooted in man’s disregard of life’s basic laws, whatever they were, farming appeared to offer a chance to learn to work with nature and to know her laws rather than to break with them.
Moreover, we wished to do something together, and farming appeared to give the best opportunity. I liked it after a previous short experience, but Beulah had much more the feel of the land, the sense of it, than I, for she was the daughter of a farmer. When we bought our horses it was she who made the bargain, a ticklish business at best. When we planted our orchard it was she who knew the varieties to choose. Certainly it was she who knew best that you just simply did not turn on a water faucet and let it run. Water is precious in the country. I only learned that two years after we started, when our spring went dry in a drought and I was forced to haul all our house water and water for the stock in milk cans from the next farm. We did not by any means begin farming as greenhorns, and I had it very deeply impressed on me that farming is preëminently a job for two persons, a man and a woman, particularly a woman like Beulah.
Thus we started, and we started with these questions: Can we begin from scratch financially and build a farm business that will be self-supporting? Can we earn a living at farming and have any energy left to make the human adjustments to life? Will there be any of the coveted leisure we seem educated to enjoy? And, without being really class-conscious and superior, we ventured the query: Are our education and experience wasted on a farm where a high-school graduate can and often does do exceedingly well at the work of farmer and housekeeper? Finally, we wanted to know whether we could achieve a unity of living rather than just simplification. This seemed to us the chief need, and we knew the problem rested on finding adequate answers to all the other questions.
To discover anything about life you do not merely try to think your way through to a solution. You have to experiment, to do, in order to grow. ‘Thought is not mature until it has passed into action.’ Of course there is danger in this kind of pragmatism, danger of wasted energy in futile experimentation. But Beulah’s philosophy has always seemed to me to give the idea greater reality. She says: ‘I think one should undertake a work as if he were going to do it all the rest of his life. If he finds he must change, let him change.’
II
One of the first things we asked ourselves was whether we could balance work and leisure on a farm. The answer, of course, is that we overworked, especially during the early or pioneering years. Since that time we have tried to stick to a reasonably short working day, except during harvest or planting time. But in the beginning there was too much to do, and too little to do it with in the way of tools and equipment. We planted an orchard and built our first poultry pen; we cleared some land and put in some corn and a garden; we brooded our first flock of chicks and were more nervous than any old hen ever was; and all the first spring and summer we lived on the second floor of our rather large house in the only weather-tight room there was, to which we had to carry all our water from the spring. There came a drought in late May and we had to bucket water to all the newly planted trees; in mid-June a wet season began and weeds grew much faster than we could possibly pull or cultivate them out of our half acre of strawberries, which we had planted as a cash crop because they required little capital outlay.
I am convinced now that rest on a farm is not sought as city workers seek it — a short working day with leisure afterward, daily throughout the year. The farmer works with nature, through longer summer days and shorter winter days, and must learn to rest with her. This is one of the lessons which can be acquired only by living near to the earth, and one does not learn it easily, especially if he has a Puritan conscience.
The old story that the farmer’s work is never done and that he cannot leave it and go home is only partly true in the twentieth century. You naturally don’t stop planting a field when five o’clock comes around if you know it is going to rain before morning; and you certainly finish threshing a crop of wheat even if it runs you into the night, when the alternative is to have it spoiled in the field from a coming storm. But you can make eight hours a base to plan on if in the meanwhile you try to follow nature’s rather changeable demands on your time. The danger is that those demands are usually severe on the farmer, and when they are coupled with economic pressure to survive he is often led into overwork. The balance of work and leisure is an attribute of civilization, and the effect of overwork — especially when pioneering, which is a contest with nature — is to decivilize or brutalize.
I can understand better now what happened to the American pioneer of the West, whose struggle cut him adrift from his civilizing inheritance. I can see how he came to lose a whole view of life, how the notion of a complete society, the goal of civilization, was forsaken in his preoccupation with his environment. This same thing can happen to the farmer. To grind, to toil for too long hours, has been the lot of many a man on the land. Beulah and I were convinced that this need not be so for the American farmer in the twentieth century. And so we made our first real attack on the problem when, two years after starting, our farm business began to require an extra worker. The farmer’s obligation to those who work with him is no less than a manufacturer’s toward his employee in the matter of hours of work. We set an eight-hour day for our fellow worker and agreed with him to stick to this as a base, varying it seasonally, such as in planting and harvest time, or when weather forced us into a longer day. We felt that if we could organize our day around his working hours we should reap the benefit as well as he. And the plan worked surprisingly well.
But the attempt to avoid the evil of overwork leads to an opposite evil. For in seeking relief from drudgery the farmer turns to the worship of things, practical contrivances. After carrying water to my thousand laying hens, which consumed a good part of each day, the electric pump and system which supplied running water to all my pens seemed like the highest achievement of civilization. The standards of our urban, industrial world today would tend to idealize practical contrivances. ‘Things are in the saddle,’ Emerson said, ‘and ride mankind.’ And the farmer, merely by virtue of the fact that he does not live in the midst of urban civilization, is not free from this false standard. To be sure, things are not in themselves mean. It is overemphasis on their value that constitutes a mean life.
In the face of this dual conflict against overwork and false standards the farmer finds his salvation, his chance of ultimately coming through to truer values, in the fact that he is constantly dealing with the basic realities of crops and babies. After ten years, I begin to see that civilization, at least on a farm, is found somewhere between brutalizing overwork and a false emphasis on things, which are really only helpful gadgets and not symbols of culture. And if I have learned anything about going slow, and taking care, and having patience, even just the least bit, it is because I have planted crops, and harvested them, and had babies in my home.
Not all farmers today have to experience quite the pioneering Beulah and I had during our first years. For those early years were not easy. However, they took us down to hardpan, though we found through the effort and waste and achievement a basic adjustment to our new life, a centre from which to grow. We could not buy an expensive place, for we had practically no money and did not want to load ourselves too heavily with a mortgage debt. Our choice was an old farm with a good Pennsylvania stone house upon it, built by Friends in 1755, when this section was almost a frontier of the mother country. It had been idle for years. The fields had grown up in brambles and sumac, and the barn had burned down. But the soil was good, market facilities excellent, the house really a beautiful one, and all in all there seemed much to build upon with our labor.
The farm had eighty-seven acres of gently rolling land with a small wood lot in one corner, and the price was $3500. This figure was somewhat smaller than the average for the neighborhood because there was no barn, the fields had reverted to the wild, and there was a flooded stream area in one portion which would have to be conquered. We paid down $800, a large portion of which we had to borrow, and gave a mortgage for the remaining $2700. Our equity in the beginning was thus practically zero. But it must be remembered that in building the farm to an operating plant we did have access to some credit, a little from the local bank, more from friends who believed in us; and in 1933, when the Farm Relief Act was passed, we were quick to refinance our privately held mortgage with the Federal Land Bank. It is an important fact that, aside from government credit, we had access to some capital, which is not by any means the case with all farmers. Our experience has taught us the vital importance of available agricultural credit in the survival of America’s small farms.
III
The farm developed. After a time we could not do all the work ourselves, and so there arose the problem of work relations, even on our small farm. Work relations on a large farm must inevitably be different and more like the relationships in industrial plants. Today we are a two-man job, and I must have a helper or fellow worker in the fields and in the poultry plant. But I do not want to be the boss of a hired man. Perhaps this is my strong American predilection for equality in a classless society. With the young man who works with us I think we have achieved a very sound relationship. Ralph is married and has his home near by. He knows the farm books, helps plan the work and the farm budget. He knows his share of the gross income and mine. He knows that if we can make the farm earn more he will receive a part of this benefit. We say, Here is a farm from which we and our families must and can earn a livelihood. We contribute differently to the farm’s maintenance and operation, and we are not partners from the standpoint of ownership; but in the realm of work relations we are fellow workers, and together we decide upon a mutually acceptable return for our labor.
Of course, I realize that in the industrial world of larger and more complicated work units than a small farm this example will contribute little to the social and economic problem. However, it does have a very real meaning for us and perhaps for all small units of work, including household work. House servants do not fit into our philosophy of life. The job of operating a household, however, especially on a farm, where the business is so closely attached to the house, quite often gets beyond the capacity of one woman to accomplish. She needs help, and so very naturally a fellow worker comes in by the day and shares our work life in the same manner that Ralph does. This way of working together wipes out all personal and class distinctions while recognizing individual differences, and is a practical application of a belief in sound human relations.
When we started farming we asked ourselves this question: Can a small farm be made to pay its way? And here it might be well to define what we mean by a small farm. It is a family farm business where the home and the business are inseparable. It is usually operated by from one to four workers, and is of an acreage not beyond their capacity to operate with reasonable machine equipment. It is not in any sense like the large grain or fruit farms of the West or the big vegetable gardens of New Jersey or the industrialized cotton plantations of the South, all of which perhaps have their place in American agriculture; nor on the other hand is it the uneconomical ten-acres-and-a-mule or other marginal farm found in every state of the country. A small farm is not just a subsistence farm, for to advocate that would be to advocate peasantry. It must be able to pay its way and maintain a reasonable American standard of living.
We have tried to build such a farm, and at the end of ten years we can say at least that we have earned our living and, in spite of building up a fairly dangerous capital debt, have paid our overhead and kept off the sheriff. Moreover, we have no longer just eighty-seven acres of land, but a plant with poultry houses and equipment and cleared fields with which to earn. The problem of survival for us lies chiefly in the fact that our overhead costs are too high (a farmer’s capital investment is usually in disproportion to his income), and that there is little parity between prices and costs.
The following brief account will indicate how we used our credit to build up the farm and equip it over the last ten years. The figures show our book values of land, stock, and equipment compiled from original cost with normal depreciation. They are not in any case speculative. I think they also show not only that the necessary capital investment is too high for our average net income of $1500 after operating costs and interest have been met, but that, since a family of six must be supported by that $1500, there is the grave problem of how the capital debt will be ultimately liquidated.
At the end of the first year we had begun to have a working plant. On that date the assets were $8435.48. But the debt in mortgage and loans was $8245.16 and the equity but $190.32 — plus, we liked to console ourselves, an old Model T Ford a friend had given us and a dog. At the end of the tenth year we have built the assets to $15,427, the debt to $10,453.97, and the equity to $4973.03. One thousand of this equity, however, was not earned; a loan was written off by a friend. The debt is large, for, as I said in the beginning, we started from scratch; and though we are able to earn our living each year with our farm business and pay all our overhead in interest and taxes, the great question remains whether we can in the end earn our way out.
This problem, of course, is shared by most farmers. But it is not an insurmountable problem. I believe in the small farm, and I believe that its relation to the larger economy can be worked out. I believe this in spite of the fact that I recognize the need of collective organization for the industrial pattern of work. If we are to preserve democratic society it seems to me we must recognize that it is essentially pluralistic in nature, and that it is possible for the decentralized organization of farming and the centralized organization of industry to live side by side.
The insistence of both Communists and Fascists on unification entails force in driving one part of society into an uncongenial pattern of life. The small farm is by nature individualistic in operation. The pattern of work is congenial to this form, and the life which arises out of this pattern is a particular way of life for the farmer, a combination of home and business. I think it is a sound institution, and, without attempting to be a Jeffersonian democrat in the twentieth century, I should like to see this institution of the small farm survive in America. But it cannot survive in isolation. It can survive only if farmers unite to bridge the gap between their small work units and the rest of the economy which is ever moving into greater centralization and collectivization. There must be some integration of these two. This, I take it, is the work of the cooperatives.
While we were still routing out sumac from our long-idle fields and building our first poultry pens and looking out over our land as we pushed back the wilderness, Beulah and I knew that we could not live entirely within our farm boundaries no matter how fascinating it seemed to us. We had to sell what we made and we had to make friends of our neighbors. At first the Farmer’s Club, a fine old institution dating from the 1870’s, seemed t he way to all this. It was nonpolitical, unhampered by the quaint ritual of the Grange, and seemed to us at first to serve a real purpose in the community. But we found that, like so many old Farmer’s Clubs, it had lost its vitality, and refused to tackle the economic problems confronting agriculture. Because it was not aggressive or realistic we turned in 1933, at the bottom of the depression, to the cooperative. There has been our salvation.
The consumer and marketing cooperatives today are going far toward tying the farmer into the general economic structure. In our present economy they serve as instruments of collective bargaining and help the small farm to partake of the advantages of large-scale trading, which it would be impossible to do in isolation. They supplement, strengthen, and preserve the small individual units by providing them with the main necessities of life available to the highly organized industrial part of society.
We are fully aware of this. As poultrymen it would be hard to think of operating our business if it were not for our poultrymen’s marketing cooperative. In fact, today we buy all our fertilizers, seeds, and feeds coöperatively, sell all our eggs and poultry coöperatively, and supply our home with most of its needs through the consumers’ coöperative we have helped to build in our neighborhood. If farming is a way of life, the coöperatives are an extension of this way. They are indeed an instrument of integration. We have helped build them here and now in our community, and as a result we know we are not isolated individualists. We belong, through our coöperatives.
Many city people think that we farmers are by nature conservative and tend to be individualists. To me there is a basic difference between competitive individualism, on the one hand, and coöperative individualism on the other. In reality the American farmer does not have a self-isolating philosophy of life. He has always cooperated in his neighborhood with his fellow farmer in harvests and times of heavy work, especially before our more technical era when machines have supplanted much man labor. The liberalism under which American farmers have lived during the last century has identified individual welfare with freedom of choice. But the old recognition of common needs which farmers have had, coupled with the discovery of modern science that there are other conditions which make people happy than just the right of free choice, is without doubt strengthening a growing rural coöperative movement in which an increasing number of farmers are joining together for mutual benefit. This seems to be the true development of the idea of the old Granger and Farmers’ Alliance movements.
IV
If, therefore, there is a distinction between competitive individualism and cooperative individualism in the realm of the farmer’s business, especially in the field of distribution, the same distinction carries over into the field of property or land ownership. In fact, the centre of the farmer’s problem in our social complex lies in this matter of property. Certainly the private nature of property in presentday economic democracy is under fire from both Communism and Fascism, and those who would have democracy meet the needs of our modern technical society would do well to see that there is a distinction between private property, with all the exclusive characteristics it has come to possess, and individual ownership of property, where this is recognized as having some social value.
I have no desire to discuss this merely as theory. I am a farmer and own land in America, where the system of what we call ‘private’ property prevails. My desire to discover a sound work relation with Ralph, my fellow worker, is born of a sense of social obligation, which likewise makes it important to discover the distinction between property confined to an owner’s unit of work and private property which is held for speculation. I feel strongly that this farm of mine is my work unit, I do not hold it for speculation. I am definitely under obligation to society to maintain its fertility and so to farm it that the soil will not erode unnecessarily. I am the trustee of this land for those who will use it after me. On it I produce food. On it we as a family work and live our lives. From it we share in the life of the surrounding community. I say: This land has social value; it is not just a commodity to be treated as capital; I have a duty toward society with respect to it.
This is not, I believe, altogether out of line with American thinking, and in this regard I should like to quote a statement made by Benjamin Franklin which Van Wyck Brooks has recently called to our attention: ‘All property, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat and other little acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me the creature of public convention. Hence, the public has the right of regulating descents, and all other conveyances of property, and even of limiting the quantity and the uses of it. All the property that is necessary to a man, for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right, which none may justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who, by their laws, have created it, and who may therefore, by other laws, dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages. He can have no right to the benefit of society, who will not pay his club toward the support of it.’
At one time in my life I decided not to use or accept an inheritance of property from my father. It seemed at that time to jeopardize my whole sense of equality. It put me in a false and privileged position in my human and working relationships. I had done no work on that property; I could use it only as unearned income. Perhaps without fully realizing the social implications of my action at the time, I yet felt the basic discrepancy between the two notions of property. According to the rules, I had the right to sell, dispose of, and speculate with my inherited land and houses for purely private ends without regard to their social value; according to my sense of the true democratic nature of property, this was all wrong — such exclusiveness I could not accept. And so I gave up an inheritance.
But I do own a farm. The facts are not contradictory, for the character of the two forms of property is essentially different. The one belongs to a competitive profit economy, which characterizes ownership as purely personal. The other I am attempting to interpret, by my work upon it and my use of it, as having social as well as private value.
But there arises the question: What is to become of this farm when Beulah and I are gone? The crux of the matter rests in the fact that the process of inheritance, beyond those things which Benjamin Franklin called ‘the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual,’ has a very definite public significance. The public, by its laws, may give social significance to land and property, and by its laws may see that they are used for the general good. I should like to see my son use this farm for his work unit. If he does not care to do so, if he wishes to exchange it for another unit of work in a different field, this would be justifiable as performing a social obligation, provided in this case that the government, would have the right to take away the speculative aspect of the transaction by regulating the transfer of land, as by taxation.
There is nothing evil in property as such any more than there is in contrivances which tend to clutter our lives. The evil lies in how we use property or contrivances. I simply am opposed to the exclusive nature of private property, and realize that the problem rests in a more general accessibility to land and in the acceptance of the idea that it has social value. Moreover I feel impelled, not just to think about the pros and cons of a problem which appears to me to be vital, but to act with my best judgment on such matters as inheritance and ownership and to seek to live in those forms which seem to bring with them the greatest liberty and the greatest justice.
V
But hard work, insufficient credit, the problem of ownership and accessibility to land — these are by no means the whole picture of American farming, for, to be sure, there are deep satisfactions in this life on the land. It would be hard to describe what the coming of spring means to a man who ploughs or what he feels on the morning when he first discovers that his wheat has sprouted in long straight green lines down the smooth field upon which he has labored. There are compensations in being surrounded by a quiet, unjangled world, and in living near his farm animals, which are to him like an enlarged family. And it is fun to prune and shape a tree in the orchard and watch its growth year by year into a form which he has helped ever so little to make. It is exciting to experiment with hybrid seed and to try to increase yield per acre.
These are the deep satisfactions, the things which bring peace if one knows how to receive them. We farmers have not all learned to receive them into our lives, and too frequently in fatigue we knock our children about or make life disagreeable for ourselves and the household. When we do this sort of thing — or shortly after, at any rate — we know well that we have not learned the art of living. Yet I believe the chances of learning it are greater here on the land than in the towns of our time. At any rate, of this much I am sure: we do escape in large part the ugliness and squalor of our industrial civilization and we do receive many of its benefits.
But it would be false to emphasize the better-known and idyllic side of rural life. What I wanted to do was to show that this fine picture was not by any means a whole one, and that persons caught in the struggle of modern living should not hold a distorted vision of rural peace and security before their eyes.
I am sure there is no turning back for society. If an industrial era based on coal and iron has built huge and terrifying cities, there is no reason why this very technology which produced our industries cannot find for us a way out. Professor Hogben says reassuringly, ‘We now stand on the threshold of an era of biological inventions with new possibilities of bodily and mental health, if we plan our resources intelligently.’ There lies before the American farmer the exciting application of biological discovery which may change the whole nature of his work in the years to come as already technology has changed and is changing the problem of labor by the application of tools. Little by little he is learning to understand nature and not to exploit the land, and through the developments of science his whole life may be revolutionized.
To be a farmer in modern America is not to escape into rural seclusion. Being a farmer nowadays is living in the midst of American life. I do not in the least suggest it as a way of living for anyone seeking an escape from modern social problems. Of course, you can go and hide in the country. But I am not talking about that. I am saying that for the farmer there is no honest turning away from the implications of society, be they economic, political, or social, for all these things impinge upon his life as a citizen.