Old McDonald Had a Farm

HERE is a sketch of the author’s father, a country preacher who at sixty-one bought a submarginal Oklahoma hill farm with money he didn’t have and in the years 1912—1922, by virtue of dogged labor, an enlightened long-term program of improvement, and pure obstinacy, made it productive and conspicuously solvent. Secondarily, the narrative makes a sort of homely prose epic of soil conservation. For the process of Old McDonald’s success consisted largely of crowbarring boulders out of hilltop wastes and building them into elaborate systems of anti-erosion dams in hillside gullies — a campaign that, killing two birds with one stone, may be said to embody the rock-bottom principle of good farm management. McDonald’s dams helped to kill, in fact, a third bird: the regional delusion of the land-destroying annual cotton crop grown on bank credit, to the utter neglect of livestock, feed crops, and food crops.

The character and his story make a valuable and a completely disarming book in spite of manifest faults in the writing. For the reader whose curiosity takes a practical turn it is a misfortune that there could not have been a rather more realistic account, year by year, of the farm’s economic and budgetary affairs.

W. F.