Tomorrow's Farmer

by ARTHUR MOORE

1

THE farmer would not be human if he did not get a wry satisfaction from the way people ask about the state of his crops and the health of his cows. He has a feeling that war conditions pretty much prove the importance of farmers. Actually, they only prove the importance of food.

If there were a better way of getting food, the American farmer as we know him would disappear. Quotations from the eighteenth century about the farmer’s being the bulwark of democracy, and arguments that on the side they rear healthy children, would not hold long in a country where food must be rationed in war and where, over the years, millions have suffered from malnutrition. The farmer’s claim to a place in an industrial economy rests on his skill as a food producer. But through an error heavy with potential harm for the whole country, his spokesmen are conducting themselves as though his claim were based on political power.

With the cry, “Union labor is your great enemy,” the farmer is being led to factional government and factional economics. His leaders fan the farmer’s suspicions of an industrial society. They play on his fear that there is no place for farming on a basis of natural economic equality. His only defense, they tell him, is a more powerful political lobby, a more intensive class struggle. But if the farmer is committed to a contest with labor, using pressure politics as a weapon, he will eventually find himself outvoted, out-pressured, and reduced to the status of a conquered foe.

For a time his lobby would continue to dominate a large bloc of Senators and Representatives just as it has in the Seventy-eighth Congress. But the population trend is against him. Between the census of 1930 and that of 1940, four states left the rural column. An estimate based on ration book distribution indicates that war industries have taken 5,600,000 persons from rural and small-town areas — a hint of what a post-war industrial boom would do to the farmer’s voting strength. Even now a rigid anti-farmer vote would defeat him in every state but four.

The farmer would not be the only loser in such a contest. It could hardly take place without lasting harm to the soil and its fertility. A wise, far-seeing food policy is not likely to be formulated in the midst of a class struggle, particularly by a nation whose history has been one of waste and extravagance. Statesmanship is needed if we merely are to preserve our food resources. If they are wasted in internal strife, the cost will be irreparable.

Great as this price would be, sheer indifference to the farmer’s troubles might be just as expensive. Like the rest of the country, when the farmer thinks of hard times he thinks of the 1930’s. The depression he should never forget was that of the 1920’s. Then he stood alone against falling farm prices and rising costs. The rest of the country looked in the garage and saw a car, into the pot and saw a chicken. With the signs of industrial prosperity everywhere, the farmer was brushed off as a habitual complainer. He had to take everything which the soil could be made to give, and had nothing to put back to preserve its fertility.

It is not a catastrophe like the 1930’s, but the long, grinding decline of agriculture under an unwise food policy, that holds the greater danger to the farmer. A period of industrial prosperity after the war might well breed another decade of indifference. So long as the farmer depends on his fading political power as his chief prop in an urban society, he must risk this, just as he invites certain defeat if he challenges labor to a finish fight.

Yet he need not follow his political leaders to indifference or defeat. The same economic forces which reduce his purely political strength increase his economic usefulness. The longer the assembly line, the more essential is the man who feeds it.

Then why do not the farmer’s spokesmen state the case for agriculture in this way and rest upon the good sense of the country? They do not, it seems to me, because they are not certain how to put it or what the answer would be. They are imbued with outworn concepts of farming, holdovers from frontier agrarianism. Many of them apparently do not comprehend the changing status of agriculture. They seem to think it means ruin because, by nineteenth-century percentages, agriculture occupies a smaller place in the nation. They strive for restoration of frontier statistics when the farmer’s welfare lies in the industrial future. They think like frontier agrarians when the farmer must live with men who wear union badges and Kiwanis buttons.

No nation with our skill in government would embark deliberately on a food policy which some day would curtail industrial output and begin our decline as a great power. To make the wiser policy clear, we have need of a new agrarianism which will state agriculture’s case in terms of an industrial food policy.

Like the old, the new agrarianism would not constitute any particular legislative program, marketing device, or price-control scheme. It would be a cluster of attitudes and deep convictions. If it should come it would be as folk-beliefs come, from a thousand little springs. It would not come as a constitutional amendment, or as a resolution before some convention, or because country newspaper editors write about it.

I only suggest here some of the attitudes it might include, the influence it might have on our political and economic future, and the instrument by which it might be advanced.

2

AN agrarianism for our time would put food ahead of farmers. Food accepted casually in peace becomes of absorbing interest when war flavors it with rationing, shortages, and high prices. Worry lest supplies fail altogether becomes acute and leads to the most extravagant predictions of disaster. But if the people understood the true relation of food to an industrial economy, their concern about it during war would differ only in degree from their concern about it during peace.

There is nothing paradoxical in the idea of an industrial agrarianism. It would be a farm policy to assure a continuous supply of nutritious food raised by a relatively few specialists so that the rest of the working force could be in factories.

The idea of continuous industrial progress is a delusion unless it is combined with a permanent, high-production world agriculture. If agriculture w ere allowed to decline, the operators of drill presses and cranes some day would have to leave their machines to grub turnips from some gullied hillside. Food for workers is the first and most important raw material, whether it be for steel in Pittsburgh, textiles in Tennessee, or bombers in San Diego.

A realization of this fact would allay the fears of an industrial society which the old agrarianism fosters. It would make the indispensability of food production so clear that the farmer no longer would doubt himself. He would no longer suspect that an industrial world was plotting to do without him. He would know that, so long as he was the most efficient means of producing nutritious food and the most effective guardian of the nation’s soil, his usefulness could not be denied.

That is why the farmer should foster the idea that food is more important than he is himself. Let him direct the spotlight away from the backwardlooking, factional remnants of the old agrarianism, and he will find his cause in more tender hands.

The point of view which puts food first is in no way degrading to the dignity or worth of farming. It is no reflection on the medical profession to say that human life comes before doctors. And Samuel Butler meant no reflection on the hen when he said, “A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” What if some outraged elder agrarian does protest, “Then a farmer is only a bushel of corn’s way of producing another bushel of corn.” The man who bases his claim for a livelihood on this skill is more valuable and is more to be respected than one who demands a living because he has a “right” to it under the standard of an outworn philosophy.

An agrarianism for our time would treat the soil as a national trust. There already has been progress toward this attitude as a result of the evangelism of Dr. H. H. Bennett and his aides in the Soil Conservation Service. The unlimited-land complex is fast disappearing. Farmers readily join conservation districts, and more each year plow on the contour. In Ohio, soil conservation already has reached the status of a public conviction, with industry joining farmers to protect the interests of both.

The work of soil scientists is revealing that horses grazing on mineral-starved lands suffer from bone diseases and uncertain reproductive powers. They are waiting for a careless nation to realize that men who live on the products of these soils must expect crooked bones, poor teeth, and a falling birth rate. They want us to look on the soil as something living and destructible. In its own setting of geological time, a handful of fertile earth squirms with life and boils with the chemistry of growth.

To keep it that way requires a sense of guardianship. The farmer who cannot pay his debts or taxes, who repairs the tractor with baling wire, who sees his family go without the niceties of town life and who cannot afford a Sunday suit himself, is not a man to treat the soil as a trust. If pushed too far, he would impoverish the national reserve of fertility. To treat the soil as it should be treated, the skilled food producer must be granted the good things of an industrial economy on a basis of full equality with other skilled producers. There cannot be one standard of living for the town and a lower one for the country.

In the new agrarianism these soil attitudes would work their way into the national consciousness. They would inspire a deepening respect for the land and for the men who stand guard over it. They would bring agriculture to a new worth in the eyes of millions who otherwise would see it as half a dozen pork chops and an argument in Congress.

An agrarianism for our time would accept guidance from the science of nutrition. This guidance would influence the choice of crops and efforts to improve nutrition by maintaining the mineral content of the soil. It would broaden the farmer’s interest to include the whole food process.

The farmer would not stand idly by while the products of his skill lost their nutritive value by careless handling on the way to market, or were restricted to relatively few consumers by high costs of distribution. He would come to see himself as the originator of the nation’s food supply, but not the only contributor to it, just as he would come to regard food as the basic but not the only contribution to industrial prosperity.

By such steps, the indivisibility of an industrial economy gradually would become one of the tenets of the new agrarianism. It would some day discourage the irresponsible bloc politician who now says, “This looks good for our boys; we’ll sneak it over when the city Congressmen are out.”

Because of this broad, inclusive characteristic, the means of advancing the new agrarianism must be a leadership equipped to see society as a whole, not as patchwork, and as it is, not as it used to be. Such an instrument is at hand. The wonder is that it has been left unused so long.

3

THE farmer’s relations to labor unions are as important as his relations to chinch bugs. Under the new agrarianism, the educational system which serves the farmer would put social science on a plane with pest control.

The land-grant colleges and the Extension Service of the Department of Agriculture have served the farmer well in regard to fertilizers, tillage, weeds, and insects. They have failed him when it comes to people. They have allowed the pressure organizations to pre-empt the task of explaining the farmer’s relations to the other groups which are part of an industrial economy.

Since the peak of the last war, “annual non-farm income has increased more than $59,000,000,000,” according to an article in the national publication of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It is no secret who is getting the bulk of this multibillion increase. Organized labor is getting it, aided and abetted by government.” In this picture of labor gouging billions from the nation there is no hint that the nation gets anything in return — automobiles, refrigerators, and electric milking machines in peace; ships, tanks, and bombers in war. It is made to appear as a wage increase, not at all as a production increase.

As an interpretation of the national income it deserves a shrug or a laugh. That it could be solemnly propounded in a publication from which thousands of farmers get their impression of national affairs is an indictment of the educational system created to serve agriculture.

Even in a field as close to their specialties as inflation, the social scientists have allowed the dominant farm organizations to hold the stage. While leaders of the chief farm groups have been careful to pay lip service to stabilization, they have sought price increases for one type of agriculture at a time, — corn, cotton, beef, dairy, then corn again, — encouraging the idea that in small groups farmers can obtain inflationary advantage without causing inflation. They appeal to the inflationist who is in all of us so long as it is ourselves against the nation or cotton growers against the nation.

The new agrarianism would have made it easy for the economists to defend the broad view which makes stabilization more to be desired than the inflation spiral. The graphs, the logic, and the farmer’s deepest wishes were on their side. They did call a series of anti-inflation meetings last year, but they failed to create the wall of opinion needed to check the price-conscious lobby. Their failure must be judged by the farm bloc in the Seventy-eighth Congress. It has been an inflation bloc.

A researcher at Iowa State College wrote last summer that oleomargarine compares favorably with butter in nutritive value and is a more efficient source of fat than butter. A hundred dairymen invaded the campus, demanding the dismissal of the author and five economists associated with him. A committee of dairymen and college officials unanimously recommended that the pamphlet be retracted — and this in a land-grant college whose social science staff was far above the average in courage as well as in ability. Two of the economists have since resigned in protest against this restriction of academic freedom. The new agrarianism would raise social science to a position where a proved fact about nutrition and manpower would be defended with the same vigor as a proved fact about hog cholera.

The purpose of the Extension Service, according to the law which established it, is to “aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects relating to agriculture.” A correct understanding of the national income, the dangers of runaway inflation, and the status of butter in a war food program certainly come within the scope of these words. So does giving the correct answer to such catch phrases as “the American market for the American farmer” and “ protect the farmer from coolie labor.” So does exposing the trick of casually interfering with the law of supply and demand when prices are in danger of going down, but citing it as an irrevocable process of nature whenever prices might go up.

If social science takes up these battles on behalf of the new agrarianism, its struggle will be uphill. College professors and “Harvard farmers” are in disrepute. There is a feeling that before a man can qualify as an expert in agricultural economics he should be able to make a calf drink out of a bucket. The campaign against social science is similar to the anger and ridicule once heaped on the “book farmers” of the physical sciences. Farmers who a generation ago objected to the inbreeding of livestock, on t he ground that it was incestuous, were scarcely less indignant than are some farmers today when they are confronted with economic doctrine. Teaching zeal overcame the old prejudices and finally earned the respect of farmers. It can do the same for the social scientists.

An invitation to the social scientists does not mean that the new agrarianism would approve a scholarly form of statism to rule over farms and farmers. Its influence would be in the opposite direction.

“I don’t need a book on scientific agriculture,” said the old farmer to the salesman. “Right now I don’t farm as good as I know how.” The farmer would be little different for asking social scientists to his counsels. No miracle should be expected. Certainly none would be achieved. He would not start the day with a page of John Maynard Keynes, followed by family statistics. He would not become a human slide rule, one of six million rural practitioners of the managerial revolution. If nothing else occurred to spoil such an idyl among the ratio charts, his hogs would get sick.

Neither would the farmer, in an excessive zeal to be managed, dissolve his politically-minded organizations. There still would be a frontier of social dispute along which the pressure groups would skirmish. The new agrarianism would not hope to dissolve the frontier, but only to move it in the direction of political and economic unity. When the farmer no longer has need for an organized political voice, then democracy will be silenced, too.

Nor would the rise of the social scientists to a place of leadership mean an endorsement of centralized farming, either by private corporations or by public agencies. A lively debate could be expected, with nutritionists, soil scientists, and economists in a tangle of conflicting claims. From it, the familytype livestock farm would emerge as the keystone of a permanent agriculture, more useful than its most sentimental admirer under the old agrarianism ever dreamed.

The new agrarianism could not be a set of blueprints from above even if the social scientists could agree on the details long enough to draw them. It would be a set of convictions from below. It could never deliver farmers into the hands of social engineers, for by its very nature it would be a people’s movement. Its tendency would be away from a planned economy, not toward it. It would push back the realm of the bureaucrat, not increase it. It would regenerate rural life, not manipulate it. It would rescue the social values of farming from a pale and bloodless existence in books and directives. It would make them living ideals in the minds of farmers, beacons of an agrarian philosophy in which the mechanic and the clerk would share.