The American Farm (February/March 1978 | Volume: 29, Issue: 2)

The American Farm

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Authors: Richard Rhodes

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February/March 1978 | Volume 29, Issue 2

The fences have come down all across Missouri. Fields in Iowa are no longer necessarily rectangular; within their Jeffersonian boundaries, many follow the lay of the land. In flat western Kansas they are often circular to accommodate the center-pivot self-propelled pipes that irrigate them. Where cotton reigned in the South, cattle now are fed, and soybeans, which once were spurned as useless everywhere in rural America or were plowed under for green manure, darken the fields of summer. Corn, wheat, cattle, and hogs change shape and variety, go hybrid with vigor; lamb is scarce as lobster; poultry are hardly farmed any more-one might say they are factoried.

In the nearly two decades since I marked the beginning of adolescence by moving from Kansas City streets to a Missouri farm, American farming has changed radically and permanently. It has not been swallowed by corporations, has not become “agribusiness,” not yet-the overwhelming majority of profitable farms today are father-son operations, father-son partnerships, or family corporations-but it has become lean and specialized, capital-intensive and cost-effective, the work of fewer men and women than ever before, the work of systems increasingly scientific and of massive machines. And proudly, without exaggeration, the wonder of the .world, a blessing we need not blush to count. “Over the past 200 years,” wrote Earl O. Heady, Curtiss Distinguished Professor at Iowa State University, in a special food and agriculture edition of Scientific American in 1976, “the U.S. has had the best, the most logical and the most successful program of agricultural development anywhere in the world.”

The farm where I moved when I was twelve, 360 rich acres outside Independence, Missouri, was also a boys’ home. A pioneercattleman and banker named Andrew Drumm, who drove hogs across the Central Valley of California to feed the miners of the Gold Rush and who ranched his way to wealth in the Cherokee Strip, established it in his will. He meant for boys who needed a home to work their way through school and he intended those boys to know intimately the sources of the food and fiber that sustained their civilization. The Drumm Institute for Boys was a thriving, diversified farm when I arrived there in the summer of 1949. With forty boys to preserve from mischievous leisure, it was also deliberately labor-intensive, and therefore persistent with practices already becoming antique. Our chickens never left the chicken house, for example, and that was technology avant-garde in 1949; but we milked our cows by hand, having so many hands available, and with oak-handled, copperplated hoes we hoed our field crops as few farmers any longer could afford to do. So Drumm’s practices were modern, but its technology was not, and I take it now as a model, somewhat enlarged, for the old family farm, a model against which to compare the high technologies of today.

We grew our food. All of it-or almost all of it. Polly’s Pop