Pushing the Hog From the Trough

by ARTHUR MOORE

1

THE land’s gone down real bad,” Tom Dibble told me. “What’s this plowing I hear about, nowadays, going around the humps circle-wise? Contour — that’s it. Maybe we ought to use a little of that.” He looked across the fields, absently tossing a handful of nuts and bolts from one hand to the other.

“Come here,” he said quickly. “Got something to show you.” It was a freezing unit he had built in his old fruit cellar. If he could get into this business, he said, he ought to make some money.

Tom would like to get away from the farm, but he knows he could not get enough from a tenant. The land isn’t good enough.

“Maybe some rich fellow in Chicago will want to buy some of this good corn-belt land for $250 an acre.” Tom winked.

Some commercial farmers, men like Tom Dibble, are a danger to the country — not because they are too commercial, but because they are not good enough farmers. And yet Tom is the third generation to work this particular farm, the only member of the family who has not escaped to the city.

Tom’s tool shed, with a workbench along one end, is his favorite place. He can make almost any repairs himself, and his equipment lasts longer than anyone else’s in the neighborhood. A dozen little contrivances of his are in operation on near-by farms: clever laborsavers which he has been glad to make and share with anyone who would haul in the needed parts in the form of wrecked automobiles or old motors. His neighbors say Tom may yet strike it rich. In truth, he might. That, is just about all Tom thinks about, anyway, now that his children are through college.

He did well by the children. One boy, a chemical engineer, is a major in the Army; another boy is a construction engineer with the Seabees; another, the oldest, is a lawyer in Chicago; his girl, the youngest of the family, is a dental laboratory technician in St. Louis. None of them on a farm — Tom doesn’t want any more failures in the family.

Tom worked hard to send the children through college. They were long, unhappy years for him because he had to put a dairy herd on the place. His gray, rolling land, miles from McLean County’s black prairie, could be made to yield the necessary cash only by intensive livestock farming. The children helped with the chores when they were home, but still the cows were a bother. And when the price of corn fell so low during the depression, Tom had to increase his hog-breeding. He added three brood sows — just enough to get the taxes paid, but an added burden on a man who had a neighbor’s corn planter to repair. When the girl was graduated from college in the late 1930’s, Tom celebrated by sending his brood sows to the packing house and by selling his dairy herd.

Prices are good now and Tom doesn’t, have much to worry him, selling soybeans and all the corn he raises. The land might worry some farmers. It is yellow along the tops of the knolls, which Tom still plows in straight rows. In these spots, even with the best hybrid seed, corn grows only about the size of a delicate woman’s wrist and doesn’t get much higher than four feet. Sometimes Tom wonders whether it is worth planting. He can remember his grandfather talking about how the land used to yield. He thinks that if his grandfather had used hybrid seed he would have got 120 bushels an acre even from the rolling land.

Tom gets about 35 bushels now from land which brought his grandfather 40 and 50 bushels with the old-type seed and with old-time tillage methods. Our interest in Tom Dibble as a type is whether his bad farming hurts the country.

2

THE United States began as a food exporter, and the belief in surplus has deep roots in our past. Because we paid for our industrial system on the returns from exported food, the idea is firmly imbedded in our business thinking. We went through the worst depression in history with pig-killing and plowing-under the popular conception of our agricultural policy. We know technology has greatly increased production per farm. “Food will win the war and write the peace,” said the Secretary of Agriculture soon after Pearl Harbor, and it was a familiar note to Americans. It was to be our food, of course; the great flood of food which we could grow and should not need.

When President Roosevelt sent a message about food to Congress late in 1943, the language had changed. He was still thinking in world terms, but the inclusive words “feed the world” had been replaced by the limiting words “assist the world.” We were to help other nations regain their productivity; we were not to feed them ourselves.

The realization that we had no surplus to back up our original declarations came slowly. Out in the country, voices were raised here and there from the agricult ural colleges, with a further disquieting effect on people who were thinking of food in terms of 1930 or 1900.

Cornell College of Agriculture economists pointed out that our only food reserves were in wheat and livestock on the farms — enough to feed Allied and liberated countries three weeks. Or if we took the radical course of slaughtering our livestock to go on a full cereal diet, and thus increase our ability to feed others, the livestock would supply our people with food for about three months. But with people instead of livestock eating corn, we should still be able to supply only a fourth of those in Allied and liberated countries.

“During the past twenty-five years, the population has increased about a third, but during the same period our total production of food and feed crops increased only a seventh,” said Dr. M. C. Bond, another Cornell economist. That is one of the reasons for the difference between our first promises and our power to deliver. It comes from deep in the nation’s economic heart.

Some people were reminded of a sentence in a report of the National Resources Board: “There has been no notable increase in crop yields for several decades.”

Professor H. C. M. Case, head of the Agricultural Economics Department at the University of Illinois College of Agriculture, carried the scholar’s view to the 1943 convention of the Illinois Agricultural Association. One of the fundamental reasons for the wartime food pinch, he declared, was the failure of production to keep pace with population over the past thirty years.

“From 1914 to 1939,” Professor Case said, “the population of the country increased one third, or by 33 million persons, while the product ion of all foods per person was 8 per cent less at the beginning of the present war than during the period 1910-1913.

“From the period 1916-1918 to the period 1941— 1943, the amount of livestock (excluding horses and mules) has declined from 1.11 to .99 animal units, or 10 per cent per person. The major change in meat animals was a 16.1 per cent decline of beef cattle per person.

“For the same periods the production of the five principal grain crops declined from 48.2 to 40.3 bushels per person — a decline of 16 per cent. In fact, for fifteen years prior to the present conflict the imports of food products into the United States exceeded our exports in value.”

At a later point Professor Case said, “Our sense of security as far as food supplies are concerned is largely the outgrowth of seven years of unusually high yields of grain. For the seven-year period beginning in 1937 and continuing through 1943 the average yield of our major crops was about 12 per cent higher than the average of 1935-1939, which was a representative period. . . . The 1942 and 1943 production of milk, meat, eggs, poultry, and wool was also unparalleled in our agricultural history and can be attributed to seven years of abundant feed supplies of all kinds. Even with these abnormally good years, however, the production per capita was slightly less than that of the years of high production during and at the close of World War I.”

Professor Case summed up these figures with the observation, “This indicates how close we are to the margin of adequate food supply on the basis of existing standards of consumption.”

A few weeks later Professor Case went to Bloomington to talk to some Farm Bureau members. He told them that during these seven years of favorable weather, enough extra food was produced to equal four fifths of an additional crop of average size. When dry, unfavorable years return, we shall look to our food resources with fresh anxiety.

Good weather is not the only factor which has hidden the truth about our productivity. George D. Scarseth, a soil chemist at Purdue University, told Illinois farmers at their 1943 meeting that “evidence of bottlenecks in fertility of the soil is piling up year by year,” though hybrid seed corn has tended to obscure it. “The hunger signs are there for anyone to see.” There is a tendency for the corn leaf to die down the middle in what farmers call “dryweather firing.” But this blight has nothing to do with an occasional dry spell. It is proof that the plant is starving for nitrogen.

3

IF THE decline in production as related to population is news in farmers’ meetings, it may seem even more strange to city dwellers. The idea that we are a country of great exportable surpluses will be a long time dying. It is too bad that those who keep it alive cannot talk with McLean County farmers and with soil experts. They would be convinced, not only that production has failed to keep pace with population, but that irreplaceable resources of fertile topsoil are gone forever.

Let us stand at the top of a gently sloping pasture and watch Howard Pantlen and his tenant. They are hitching a special ground-breaking plow to a tractor. With no more fanfare than a casual wave of the hand, it begins to move steadily, turning the kind of sod which once yielded to the pioneer a foot at a time, and then only to the lunges of six oxen. This is one of the few remaining patches of the virgin prairie soil. It has been in one family for several generations and so has escaped the merchants of fertility. Until the need for food became so great in this war, it had never been used for anything except grazing.

Nobody knows how many acres of like ground felt their first plow after the outbreak of World War II. Certainly there are several thousand acres in similar small areas. In the nineteenth century an Austrian scholar described the flood of food from such land as “ the greatest economic event of modern times,” comparable to the flow of gold when the New World was discovered. This soil was the economic foundation of industrialism in Great Britain and Western Europe. It pulled down ancient authority and reared new privilege. It struck off ancient chains and forged a new bondage. In this country, it still is the hub of the most powerful industrial system on earth, one now winning its second world war — with all that the defeat of Nazi and Japanese tribalism means to the future of mankind.

In the way of the prairie, the new land will not come into full productivity until its third straight year in corn. But Pantlen knows what it will yield, for another field, first plowed and planted in 1941, came to its full fruitfulness at 120 bushels to the acre. That is what any reasonably good remnant of virgin prairie will produce for today’s farmers.

A yield of 120 bushels to the acre. And in the same season the average yield for McLean County was about 55 bushels to the acre. That is the measure of our land’s decline.

Going back to virgin soil is not the only way to reveal the loss the corn belt has suffered. It can be measured by the achievements of the most skillful farmers of today — the most skillful retain or restore the original fertility.

On his farm south of Bloomington, Sam Bayless used limestone, clover, manure, and phosphate to increase yields from 30 bushels an acre to 75 bushels an acre. Ernst Heyn, on rolling timber soil southeast of Bloomington, got 73 bushels an acre in 1943 on land which yielded 30 bushels when he began farming it twelve years before, Howard Layton drilled corn at 12-inch intervals on terraced land. The corn followed alfalfa in soil that was limed several years ago. On this soil, second-rate by prairie standards, Layton produced 122 bushels of corn to the acre in 1943.

The odd thing about the decline is that McLean County knows about it and isn’t particularly concerned. For this unconcern there are two reasons. The first is a habit of mind associated all over the world with productive soil. “Where the land is the best,” an economist once said, “the people do the least.” Second is the fact that, no matter how agriculture is suffering, no matter how yields decline, McLean County is always better off than the vast majority of farm communities. This is true of the whole corn belt as contrasted with less favored areas. This sense of comparative prosperity has, in the past, been a natural deterrent to any improvement of the soil. The best farms have gone on, extracting top yields with the latest kind of machinery and the best seed. Only of late has there been a growing concern for the day after tomorrow.

Governor Thomas E. Dewey told fellow governors that in the long run there could be only one outcome of food shortages such as were felt in New York City during certain periods of the war. Human beings, he said, will push the pig away from the trough and eat the corn themselves. He was quite right. His temper was ruffled over the shortage of corn for Eastern livestock, but he was only saying what the late Dr. George F. Warren, Cornell University’s famous economist, had said twenty-five years before: “When men get hungry, they will prefer to eat seven pounds of corn rather than one pound of pork.”

If America ever has to shift to a cereal diet, it will be because the mass of the people cannot afford to buy the meat and dairy products they prefer. To city people wondering about the future price of food, the most important land in the country consists of a half-dozen little plots on the campus of the University of Illinois. A small boy could throw a rock across them all; yet they tell the story of the fall of empires.

For sixty-five years they have been planted to corn, the crop which in large measure determines the price of meat and eggs and dairy products. One plot has been planted to nothing but corn, year after year; others to corn in various combinations of fertility-saving rotations. During the twelve-year period from 1910 to 1921, the cost of a bushel from the “continuous corn” plot was 60 cents. During the second twelve-year period, from 1922 to 1933, the cost of corn from this plot rose to 78 cents a bushel. Reason: the number of bushels had declined because of loss of fertility.

It was a different story on the plot using a fertility-saving rotation of corn, oats, and clover. The cost per bushel here decreased from 41 cents in the first twelve-year period to 40 cents in the second period, because the yield was increased.

A farmer like Tom Dibble has the same effect on food prices as the “continuous corn” plot. Livestock, the best means of keeping his yields high, was too much trouble. His eyes were on quick riches and on town success. So the land yields less and less; what it produces costs more and more.

From the point of view of the town dweller, there is great danger in the methods of farmers like Tom Dibble. They have already squandered much of the splendid fertility on which American progress, both industrially and agriculturally, was founded, and they continue to dissipate our heritage. It is later than we think: let there be enough Tom Dibbles on the land, and we shall some day be pushing the hog away from the trough.