The Tractor Revolution

by JAMES H. STREET

1

DURING the war years, our American farmers achieved the most remarkable crop-production record of all time. In 1942 they raised more food than in any previous year, and by the peak year of 1944 their production exceeded the 1935-1939 average by 36 per cent.

This enormous increase in production is the more extraordinary because it was accomplished in the face of a decline of about two and a half million in the farm labor force from 1940 to 1944. Farmers of course worked longer hours during the war, and they were aided by generally favorable weather. But by far the most significant reason for their increased productivity has been the sweeping technological change in agriculture.

Despite wartime restrictions on the manufacture of farm machinery, the number of tractors on American farms has increased by over 34 per cent since 1940. There have likewise been amazing increases in the use of highly specialized tilling and harvesting equipment. During the first three years of the war alone the number of mechanical corn-pickers increased by 29 per cent, combine harvesters by 31 per cent, pickup hay-balers by 67 per cent, and milking machines by 49 per cent. In 1943 one third of the entire United States corn crop was harvested by machine, although the corn-picker had been introduced only a few years before.

The trend toward industrialization means better agriculture, but it threatens to disrupt our entire mode of rural life. Almost until the present generation, the average farmer’s aspiration was to own just enough land to support his family comfortably according to modest rural standards. It was a subsistence-based concept of agriculture, with the emphasis on production for use rather than for sale. The family-sized, fully owned farm has remained the American ideal, but in recent years many a farmer has struggled up the successive rungs of the ladder, from wage work to sharecropping to cash tenancy to encumbered ownership, only to discover that a neighbor who is merely renting or managing land is better off than he with his heavy debt load. Moreover, the definition of a family-sized farm is now more commonly set by the productive capacity of a man’s tractor than by the needs of his family.

An Army poll taken before demobilization began indicated that from 800,000 to 1,000,000 servicemen intended to go into full-time farming after their discharge. Another 500,000 planned to take up parttime farming. These prospective farmers, together with thousands of industrial workers who left the farms temporarily during the war and additional thousands of farmers’ sons maturing each year, will undoubtedly enter into heavy competition for farm land. Land values in some areas are already inflated, and agricultural officials fear a land boom similar to the one which resulted in so many farming failures after the First World War.

Although many people still identify the soil with personal security, and every depression has seen a drift “back to the land,” the long-range movement is toward the city and town. The proportion of the American working population engaged in agriculture was only 26 per cent in 1920, and by 1943 it had dropped to about 15 per cent. Of the estimated 6,300,000 persons who left the farms from 1940 to 1944, it is likely that a majority will never be able to return to an adequate livelihood in farming.

2

THE gasoline tractor, though by no means the first important invention in agriculture’s technological revolution, was perhaps the most dramatic. Its greater pulling power vastly increased the effectiveness of large implements like the harvester-thresher combine. During World War I the tractor and combine began to turn the Great Plains into a grain factory of previously unimagined proportions. The number of man-hours required to grow an acre of wheat dropped sharply, and the size of individual farms could be expanded. Many returning soldiers of that war found they were no longer needed on the farm, and were forced to join the unemployment ranks of 1921.

The mechanization of wheat farming went on long after the war. Between 1926 and 1930, implement manufacturers in this country turned out 115,000 combines, as compared with 25,000 during the previous five years. By 1938, 90 per cent of the wheat in Kansas was being harvested by combine.

Many who read The Grapes of Wrath toward the close of the Depression were startled to learn what had been going on in the rural areas of the country. Some wondered whether the large population movements which Steinbeck described could actually have taken place. But not the families who experienced those hungry years in the Southwest. During the period from 1930 to 1938, over 60,000 tractors came into Texas alone — an increase of 165 per cent over the number already in use. C. Horace Hamilton, rural life economist at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, who has made an intensive study of the human consequences of agricultural mechanization, estimated conservatively that each new tractor meant at least one family displaced from the land. He cited one instance in which as many as nine families were displaced by a single tractor.

The Okies did not come from Oklahoma alone. They came from the corn and wheat areas as well as the cotton lands. They came from fruit and vegetable farms scattered from New Jersey to Florida. They came even out of the Ozarks and the Appalachians, those last strongholds of subsistence farming. Large numbers of these workers have been temporarily anchored by industrial jobs or military service; but if industrial employment falls off, they will soon be on the move again, looking for jobs and farms in the rural areas they know best.

The number of tractors on United States farms was nearly doubled during the ten years before the war; by 1940 there were about 1,600,000 in use. When you consider that those were largely depression years and that the purchase of a tractor and complementary equipment is one of the major undertakings of a lifetime for the average farmer, you realize that something was literally shoving farmers along the road to mechanization. If they could not buy on the installment plan, they often mortgaged their farms to acquire machines during this period.

There are now well over 2,000,000 tractors on American farms, and they have had a powerful influence on the consolidation of landholdings. The use of power-drawn equipment usually means the need for a larger farm, both because it is easier to work more land and because the larger investment requires a larger return. Farm operators ordinarily solve the problem by buying or renting additional acreage, which frequently means the displacement of the previous tenants. The Corn Belt farmer who used to think that a quarter section was all a man could reasonably handle may now feel cramped unless he can operate a section or more. Not uncommonly his holdings are scattered in tracts several miles apart; the problem of distance has become less important with the use of the farm truck and the rubber-tired tractor.

Another development which has contributed to the centralized control of farm land is the extension of the vertical pattern of business organization which links distributors and processors directly with their sources of raw material. Thus rubber manufacturers such as Goodyear have acquired textile mills and large cotton farms to supply themselves with tire cord. Quickfreezing plants and canneries operate their own truck farms or have contract arrangements which give them effective control over enormous acreages. Sugar refineries have similar contracts with beet and cane growers. Insurance companies and banks which acquired farm real estate as investments or through depression foreclosures now find themselves practicing agriculture on a large scale.

The farmers who were displaced by consolidation have inevitably entered into competition with each other for the limited remaining acreage. As a result the number of very small farms has been increasing at the same time that large farms have been multiplying. Census figures do not always make clear that these subdivided farms are on the poorer lands, or that they represent the tightening confines of America’s rural slums.

It is thus paradoxical that the tendency toward greater commercialization on the part of some farmers drives other farmers to an increasing dependence upon subsistence farming. In ordinary times the competition in the limited agricultural market is so severe that only the low-cost producers can afford to stay in business. The rest are forced to live on what they raise, rather than what they sell. Analysis of census figures by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics has shown that the overwhelming bulk of the agricultural production which goes into commercial channels is produced by less than half of the nation’s farms. In 1939, one third of the farms in the United States marketed only 3 per cent of all farm products sold, and another third produced only 13 per cent additional of the total marketings.

If markets shrink again during the next few years, it will be the small, less efficient producer who is squeezed out of the commercial economy and perhaps out of farming entirely. This result may be better for agriculture as a whole, but it leaves unsolved the problems of those who must find their livelihood elsewhere.

3

THE future may bring even more startling changes in farm technology. Among the factors which make technological change so ominous for the farmer, even as he pursues its advantages, are its cumulative effect and its unpredictability. A single invention may not revolutionize farming, but when in growing corn you get mechanical cross-cultivation, plus high-producing hybrid seed, plus improved fertilization, plus a mechanical picker-sheller, you are in a new farm economy.

Western sugar-beet growers have been engaged in adapting a similar series of recent inventions to their needs. The blocking, thinning, and harvesting of beets ordinarily require a great deal of hand labor, and the shortage of seasonal help was keenly felt during the war. The introduction of single-germination seed has already made possible the elimination of much hand hoeing in the thinning operation; and mechanical lifters, toppers, and loaders will soon put the heavy harvest job on an assembly-line basis — for those farmers who can afford the equipment. Automatic beet-loaders are already widely in use. In coming years these inventions may mean that thousands of migrant workers who make the annual trek from Texas and New Mexico to the beet fields of Michigan and the Mountain States will have to accept starvation wages or look elsewhere for work.

A similar threat hangs over the depressed cotton economy of the South. As early as the summer of 1941, I saw cotton in the Mississippi Delta being check-cultivated by tractor in the way already well established in corn. Application of this method had waited only upon development of uniformly germinating seed. The Negro tractor driver I talked with was making $4.00 a day — far above the prevailing wage for day labor — but with a tractorcultivator he was doing the work of several families of choppers. For several years the great plantations in this section have been poison-dusted for boll weevil by airplane — a practice that is also being carried on in Eastern truck farming and other cropping areas where the contiguous acreage is large enough.

The social-minded Rust brothers of Memphis, who invented a successful mechanical cotton-picker several years ago, were so conscious of the implications of their invention that they would not release it for unrestricted sale. Almost as soon as the machine was ready for trial, they arranged for the profits from its distribution to go into a foundation for the study of the tremendous economic problems of the rural South. Their picker has not yet come into general use, but the Wall Street Journal has reported that six companies are undertaking commercial production of cotton-picking machines. On the High Plains of Texas a considerable number of farmers met the wartime labor shortage with a stripper-type cotton harvester.

Cotton is subject to other possibilities of an even more revolutionary nature. The rivalry of synthetic products such as rayon and nylon has led to research into the possibility of “piping” cotton to the textile mill to eliminate some of the stages now necessary in its processing. It has been suggested that the cellulose in cotton bolls could be harvested with a suitable combine or stripper before the bolls burst open for picking. The cellulose would be reduced chemically to liquid form and shipped to rayon mills in tank cars, instead of going through the regular ginning, baling, carding, and spinning processes. Such a proposal would doubtless sound fantastic to the average cotton farmer, and it may never be adopted. But the battle between cotton and synthetics promises to be severe, and cotton has already lost several rounds. Rayon and nylon, aside from their uses in textiles, are now being used extensively in automobile, truck, and airplane tires, which before the war formed a major outlet for cotton fiber. Paper is also shouldering cotton out of important markets in the bag, towel, twine, and upholstery industries.

Manufacturers are often able to cushion the impact of technological change through patent restrictions and trade agreements. This is not the case in agriculture. Soviet plant physiologists a few years ago announced that they had discovered an important new principle of plant-growth regulation, which they called “vernalization.” By a relatively simple process of soaking and chilling the seed, they reported that they could change the reproductive period of winter grains to that of spring grains, without losing their qualities of hardihood. This promised that grain could be harvested within the extremely short growing seasons of northern Siberia, where cereal plants had never been known to head before. Moreover, the principle was believed to have general application to other plants.

Within three years experiments in the vernalization of plants were reported from nearly every country in Europe, the United States, Canada, several South American countries, China, India, Australia, and several parts of Africa. The crops tested included all the common cereals and forage grasses, as well as cotton, flax, hemp, potatoes, turnips, beetroot, lentils, spinach, melons, artichokes, hops, and tobacco. Even the Bermudian Easter lily industry got excited about the possibility of regulating the flowering of plants so that they would come into the market at exactly the right time.

This example is cited to suggest the world-wide rapidity with which agricultural innovations may be seized upon and developed, with totally unpredictable consequences for particular farming enterprises. The possibilities of modern plant physiology and genetics in increasing the world’s food supply and transforming agriculture are only beginning to be appreciated.

It would be foolish to become alarmed about sweeping technological changes which have not yet occurred. Those which are already taking place are enough to worry about, once the prop of a warcreated market is withdrawn from American agriculture. Our problem is no longer to fear with Malthus that we cannot raise enough food for the needs of the world, but to devise a program which will avoid the dilemma that confronted every farmer during the last depression. At that time, with normal outlets glutted, the national farm policy sought to effect drastic cuts in production. It is easy to see the irony in a policy of killing little pigs and plowing under every third row of cotton; many people saw it then, but they were desperate.

Yet while it seemed to the economic interest of farmers as a whole to limit production, after the pattern which had been set by industry, the individual farmer felt compelled to produce more than ever. He felt obliged to cut costs, intensify, increase yields — in short, to do everything possible to advance his position in relation to his competitors.

Consequently, while the average acreage planted to corn in the years 1937 to 1943 was reduced by 12,000,000 acres, as compared with the average for the previous seventeen years, the average yield per acre increased from 25.9 to 30.1 bushels, and the average total harvest increased by 85,000,000 bushels. The same sort of thing happened in other major crops, to the despair of officials in charge of the cropreduction program. It indicated at once the complete helplessness of the individual farmer to deal with a farm problem which required a collective solution, and his dependence upon the best agriculture he knew how to apply.

4

THE future of American agriculture poses a major problem for national policy. As with all social problems of this magnitude, no simple solution is possible, and only a few suggestions can be sketched here. To begin with, we should be able to avoid certain confusions which have marked our previous approaches to the problem. We shall do well to keep in mind several things.

1. The trend toward mechanization in agriculture cannot be stopped, nor even materially slowed down. We can no more halt technology on the farm than the British could stop their own similar Enclosure Movement beginning over two centuries ago.

Even if we thought it advisable to slow down mechanization of our farms, it would go on in other countries. On a visit to the fertile Laguna district of northern Mexico in the summer of 1940 I saw the ejiditarios of the collective farms staging a colorful review for President Cardenas — a demonstration of the mass use of modern tractors and wheat combines on large blocks of expropriated land. And in the Soviet Union several years before the war, farmers’ collectives were already employing a mechanical cotton-picker as well as other modern types of equipment. Russian tractor output at that time was second only to ours; in 1935, four large factories turned out 112,566 machines, compared with 156,858 produced that year in the United States. This industry was one of Russia’s first great war casualties, but plans are said to be under way for the operation of seven huge tractor plants.

2. We must begin to think of agriculture as an industry, not as a place to which we can shunt our unemployed urban population. For those people, as well as for the persons periodically displaced from agriculture, we are going to have to find other sources of employment. It may again become necessary to set up subsistence homesteads in marginal land areas as housing and relief measures, but this should not be confused with a program for agriculture.

3. The trend toward centralized control of the land can probably not be arrested by a direct frontal attack, but it must be faced before conditions approach those of portions of pre-war Europe. The familysized farm is still a good ideal to strive for, but it must be realistically defined in terms of commercialized agriculture. The economic farm unit will naturally vary with the crop region and the stage of technological advance which has been reached. “Forty acres and a mule" may still apply in some parts of the tobacco country, but hardly in the Corn Belt. We can best combat the tendency toward centralization by enhancing the opportunities for smaller farmers to get into commercial production on a sound economic basis. The recent advent of small, general-purpose tractors and baby combines will help, as will such cooperative arrangements as the group ownership of large equipment and the use of artificial insemination to improve dairy stock.

4. The maintenance of a “good price“ will not provide the automatic solution to farmers’ post-war readjustment difficulties. There can be no quarrel with the aim of good farm prices as an accompaniment to general prosperity. But if markets do not hold up and the government is forced to make good its legislative pledge to support the prices of warexpanded crops for two years after the emergency, the American public may get a terrific bill. Furthermore, such a subsidized price program, which applies indiscriminately to all farmers, will hand a windfall to the large low-cost producer while merely enabling the average farmer to survive. It would be less expensive and more effective to design a program which would specifically encourage the family-sized farm and thereby preserve the yeoman class of farmers, who have been such an important part of American democratic life.

The parity formula on which present price guarantees are based represents price relationships which existed before the First World War. As Secretary of Agriculture Anderson recently pointed out, these relationships often do not reflect the modern requirements of a well-rounded agriculture. We know, for example, that in ordinary times we produce too much cotton in the South, and not enough milk and other high-nutrition foods. A disproportionately high price on cotton tends to prevent the needed introduction of soil conservation measures, in effect subsidizes the artificial fiber industries, and encourages foreign producers to grow more competitive cotton.

On the positive side, here are some of the things that need to be done.

1. We need to ensure a very high level of employment in the manufacturing and service fields if agriculture isto stay on its feet in the coming period. This may appear to dodge the problem by focusing attention elsewhere, but the conclusion is inescapable. Farming is by this time inseparably tied up with the rest of the economy, and a depression would hit agriculture doubly hard since it would take away its major market at the same time that the forces we have been describing would come fully into play.

If we do not maintain a reasonably prosperous economy in the future, the only alternative will be a rigidly controlled agriculture in which we try to overcome the effects of technological advance by sharp restrictions on production. For farmers, this will mean close regimentation — and for many, no chance to farm at all. For the rest of us, it will mean needless scarcities of the farm commodities which could be produced.

2. As a corollary to the maintenance of a full domestic market, we must make every effort to work out international trade arrangements which will yield a world outlet. That will mean some competition with our own products, of course, and will eventually lead to regional specialization, but it is essential to the stimulation of world prosperity and to the prevention of agricultural price wars in which no country gains.

The desperate need for food in Europe and Asia offers us at once an opportunity to demonstrate our continuing interest in a peaceful, prosperous world, and a chance to cushion the shock to our economy as the wartime market fades. It would be nothing but good business to help other countries get to their feet during the years ahead.

3. Mechanized farming demands an increased use of agricultural credit. In recent years the Federal government has gone a long way to provide credit to farmers at rates commensurate with those available to urban businessmen. But as we enter the coming era it is highly urgent that we re-examine the adequacy of the credit facilities open to farmers. Before the war the larger operator could generally get along with the forms of credit provided by private banks, the Federal Land Banks, and the Production Credit Associations. And the very poor farmer was provided a limited supply of credit by the Farm Security Administration through its rehabilitation and tenantpurchase loans.

Falling between these groups, however, there was a considerable number of potentially successful farmers who could not qualify for either type of loan, either because the requirements for FLB and PCA loans were too high, or because those for FSA were too low. Since then the amount of funds available for FSA loans has been stringently curtailed. Thus the often unsatisfactory private loans are the only means of credit available to thousands of farmers who might otherwise make a go of farming.

For the returning veteran the prospect is not much better, since under the GI Bill of Rights the government will guarantee only up to $2000 of a loan for which he himself must find the lender. The Army’s poll of servicemen who intended to go into farming revealed that most of them were thinking of investing up to $4000 in a farm, which may be compared with the Department of Agriculture’s estimates of $5000 to $8000 as the average cost of a family-sized farm (not counting the necessary tools, equipment, and livestock).

4.In distinguishing between credit and relief needs, it is not intended to rule out the latter. No matter how well our economy functions, there will probably be a need for rural welfare programs just as there will be such needs in urban areas. Nutritional, health, and sanitation requirements on farms are often overlooked simply because they do not occur in concentrated form. There are slums in the country fully as bad as those in cities, and when we consider our national housing needs we should not neglect the farms.

We do not even have to start at the level of housing construction. It is appalling to contemplate how few rural homes have the most ordinary conveniences of city life. Fewer than one farm home in five had water piped into the house in 1940, and fewer than one in three were lighted by electricity. Moreover, the national averages obscure the fact that these advantages were concentrated in the Hay and Dairy Belt, the Corn Belt, and the valleys of the Far West. Only about 4 per cent of the farm dwellings in four Southern states had piped water, and fewer than 13 per cent had electricity in 1940. Since that time the TVA and local cooperatives sponsored by the Rural Electrification Administration have brought electricity to many additional farms, but the majority of farm housewives still wait for the opportunity to use an electric washing machine and an electric iron.

The possibility of comfortable living for our rural population is here, thanks to the very technology which threatens its disruption. It is important to recognize that the countless human services the farm population lacks can be partly supplied from its own ranks, and thereby provide employment for those who can no longer stay in agricultural production. Rural areas are notoriously deficient in distributional facilities and in medical, educational, and other services, and the life of farming communities will be greatly enriched if their young people have the opportunity to enter these fields.

All of this, it cannot be said too often, depends upon what kind of economy we can achieve under conditions of restored peace. The assurance of a reasonable standard of diet for the American people alone would go a long way toward solving the farm problem. If we can maintain a sufficiently high level of commercial activity to permit agriculture to use its tremendous resources, we shall have done well. If we cannot, we had better look for serious trouble on the farm.