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Now farmers are taking the big step from mechanization to automation in the raising of animals and fowl; they are copying the assembly-line techniques of industry and bringing animals indoors. Once man felt he could not provide an environment for animals as good as nature's. Now he knows he can do a whole lot better. Behind him, giving him confidence, are ever-new discoveries in antibiotics, hormones, climate control, nutrition and plant and animal genetics.
Failure & Scandal. The result of all this is that farm productivity is soaring at a rate that once nobody believed possible. From 1938 through 1957, overall farm labor productivity rose at an annual average rate of 4.7% (v. 2.2% for the rest of the economy). Even more significant, productivity is increasing at an accelerating rate. Last year, it jumped 8%, as much as the increase for the decade 1920-30. This technological fact, ignored by the politicians, is what has made the farm-support program such a failure and scandal. Last year, with farmers paid $620 million to put land in the soil bank, the planted acreage was reduced to the smallest since 1919. But the yield was 11% greater than in the previous record year of 1957. This year, in many crops, the U.S. is headed for even bigger surpluses. The 1959 wheat harvest was forecast last week at 1.2 billion bu. This will add 200 million bu. to the record 1.3 billion bu. wheat carryover expected this July1. With productivity shooting up like the kudzu vine, even veteran farm lobbyists are beginning to wonder if any kind of a subsidized farm program can be anything but a failure and scandal.
In the Box. For Farmer North, the revolution in farming came at precisely the right time. Twenty years ago Warren North could not afford a pair of new work shoes; he did his chores in an overshoe and a boot. Today, by taking full advantage of all the scientific advances, plus an amount of hard work that would have broken a weaker man, North is comfortably a millionaire. But he remembers every struggling step of the way up. Born in 1913 on the farm he now owns, near Brookston (pop. 1,100), in northwest Indiana, North started in field work at the age of seven, the year after his mother died. His father bolted a box to a harrow, and North, riding in the box. drove the team. His father followed, driving another team pulling a corn planter.
At nine, North was experienced enough to work in the fields alone. Life around Brookston was grim for all farmers in those days after the collapse of prices following the World War I boom, and it was harsh at the North farm. Dale North, the father, was not satisfied unless everybody got up at 3:30 to milk, eat and harness up, so they could get into the fields by 5:30. The cheerless life in Widower North's house still troubles Warren North: "We never even had a Christmas tree." By 1930 the father saw the way clear to let Warren's twin sister Wanda go off to teachers college. Warren himself was ready to go away in three months, study the organ for a term, then enter engineering school the following fall.