THE HEART OF THE FARM PROBLEM
Lord, Russell
The Heart Of The Farm Problem MEET THE FARMERS, A Personal Introduction to Thirty Million Americans, by Ladd Haystead. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. 221 pp. $2.50. Reviewed by Russell...
...But I do not think that he would see much hope at present of the multitude of little farmers effecting such combinations...
...He suggest that laissez-faire, let loose to run in determining size of holdings and forms of tenure, may lead to the right proportion of big holdings and operations on suitable terrain...
...Lately, in Georgia, I showed this paragraph to a flaming enthusiast for combining small hill farmers into large-scale cooperative production units, completely mechanized...
...He refuses to join with the well-fixed and complacent owners and operators who say that FSA's cooperative farm adventures were dangerously communistic...
...He talks with them, likes most of them—be it rightish Wheeler McMillen of The Farm Journal or leftish Carey McWilliams who wrote III Fares the Land...
...He writes as if he had his feet on the desk.deeeptive appearance, possibly, for the writing that is easiest to follow is the hardest to get down on paper, as a rule...
...His faith in our soil is a bit like that of oldtime farmers who believed that to rub a little honest dirt into any sting, sore, would heal it...
...This fellow's no friend of my kind of farmers, but he's, telling us what we've got to do-combine !" this man in Georgia said...
...HAYSTEAD quotes an old saying, blithely: "Them as has, gits...
...Don't kid me," he said...
...He laughs with them, snorts at this, sniffs at that, absorbs their separate lines of dogma, and then proceeds in carefully unbuttoned prose to write...
...With scowling glee he tells of a prominent farm technician in a field apart from dairying who insisted that the cows he owns in a herd that a dairyman manages for him average over 100,000 (actually 10,000) pounds of milk a year...
...As a reporter his thoughts naturally take shape and color from the last persuasive man he interviewed, and his work as Farm Editor of Fortune has naturally taken him more often among the rich and mighty than among the poor and driven...
...There is no "average farmer," no "farm type...
...But it is excellent to have a shrewd, warm-hearted, and reasonably independent reporter exhibit the heart of the whole farm problem...
...I have myself observed, somewhat reluctantly, that land held in large blocks by absentees and expertly managed by professional farming concerns is often better farmed, from the conservation standpoint, than smaller "family-farm" holdings in general...
...Strong for conservation and an overall approach to the whole problem of soil and human waste, he warns his readers not to trust partitioned agricultural experts when they stray beyond their strict fields...
...Let the big ones keep getting bigger and somehow we shall find place for enough "family farms" in the intercises, and find in addition enough more good land for subsistence farms to keep the postwar unemployed off relief...
...Having traveled, read, and thought enough to set himself up as an authority on agriculture, he still prefers to remain the irreverent reporter'with a byline and the right of free comment...
...He knows the head men of every shade and school of agricultural thought and interest...
...With economic and social pressures as they are today and in postwar prospect this, I fear, is too easy and amiable an answer...
...The moral is that an overtrained technician can get to be about as ignorant of agriculture in general as a city news specialist, and more dangerously so, for the technician is still supposed to know all that there is to know about farming...
...This reminds me of a time when I tried to tell a city editor about a 15,000 pound cow as a possible local story...
...The meatiest paragraph in his book, and the hardest one to laugh off, in my judgment, is this one: "There are farmers, completely mechanized, on good soil, with amazingly skillful new management techniques who say their costs on a bushel of wheat are down around 15 cents, corn about 30 cents, hogs $5.50 a hundredweight, etc...
...Traveling 50,000 miles last year alone, this author has squatted with Indian-American subsistence farmers in New Mexican adobe villages and dined with the manager of a corporate wheat ranch in the High Plains country where the only home product on the table was the water in a vase containing hothouse flowers from town...
...The case for the absentee gentry—often corporate bodies employing skilled engineers and managers such as Howard Doane of St...
...Louis—is a harder case to defend...
...Reviewed by Russell Lord "THEY were good farmers," Ladd Haystead re-marks of a certain cult in Canada, "even if it did take the Northwest Mounted Police to make them put their clothes on...
...WITH one eye always cocked at the city reader, Haystead explains what a legume is and hammers at the fact that American farmers are not a race and breed apart, but simply the rest of us, farming...
...Haystead, I gather, would not be against the idea...
...He believes fervently in the good that rich city farmers do, with their fresh and eager approach to farming, their money, their intelligence and enthusiasm...
...But I wonder if this in itself justifies an increasing and all but frightening concentration of so much of the best farmland in America into strictly business holdings and operations such as these...
...His bias in favor of big business farming, both resident and delegated, is plain and plainly stated...
...but must add that in my home county of Harford, Maryland, the moneyed farmers seem in places to be crowding the ordinary farming families away from turf and dairying back toward row-crops, clean-tilled for the canneries, sometimes on dangerously steep slopes...
...I believe in that, too, in some measure...
...Born in the great West, with a very light overlay of Eastern metropolitan sophistication, his great and needed contribution in the generally stuffy field of contemporary agricultural literature is that of a reporter...
...Compare these prices with the "starvation" levels of $1.40, $1.07 corn, $13.75 hogs, and $16.00 beef which are current...
...But this is an old argument, dating, doubtless, from the days of such gentry as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson...
...It is as a nay-sayer to the established mental stereotype's of farmers and farming that I like Fortune's farm reporter best...
...Having heard the claims to special virtue of the big operators, of the family-farm advocates and of the zealots who see the land as a God-given dump for the urban unemployed, Haystead seems to agree with all of them and to give them all his blessing...
...A 15,000 pound cow would be as big as an elephant...
...HAYSTEAD has served as secretary of the City Farmers' Club of New York City...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 29
