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Joe Moore is one of 4,000,000 U.S. farmers, a group so varied as to thwart the sociologists' search for a "typical" member. Yet mid-century U.S. farmers in general have characteristics of working and living that set them apart from farmers of other lands and times. The world (including the recently visiting Russians) marvels at U.S. farm production. How American farmers do it is a mystery, even to most of their compatriots. The secret: they preserve individualism and personal enterprise while embracing a thousand forms of cooperative effort, from federal price supports down—or up—to such voluntary organizations as the F.F.A. Joe Moore's story is a part of the secret.
Beginning in Darkness. Just a few days before Joe left for Kansas City to attend the annual Future Farmers' convention, the Chromaster clock sounded its alarm at 4:30 a.m. in his bedroom at home. Shocked to wakefulness after eight hours of sleep, Joe swung out his bare feet and reached for the mound of khaki clothes on the linoleum floor. The shirt, clammy from three days' accumulated sweat, clung dankly to him. The pants, crusted with dirt and splotched with tractor grease, slipped on over the cotton print shorts in which he had slept. The three-hook farm shoes, their sides eaten by barnyard acids, stayed untied as he clomped to the door of his parents' bedroom and hallooed to wake his mother.
Outside, Joe knelt in the dew-laden Bermuda grass, tied his shoe laces, then swung off in easy, economical strides toward the neat, white smokehouse. There, ducking under three Tennessee hams and some sides of smoked fatback, he filled a five-gallon grease bucket with wheat shorts, crimped oats and water to make a slop for the four Duroc sows that were nursing their first litters in the orchard lot. To the hog troughs he took the shortest route, leading through the family cemetery behind the house. As the wire gate clicked shut behind him, Joe passed by the chest-high tombstone of his great-grandfather, Samuel Sampson Carver (1847-1938), symbol of a farm era that, although gone, still presses its influence on Joe Moore and all his contemporaries.
Energy & Erosion. Sam Carver, a fourth-generation native of Jackson County, Tenn., returned from a Union prison after the Civil War, gathered together what money he had, borrowed some more, bought about 800 acres along Dry Fork Branch, near Liberty, and set out with grim energy to wring his living from the land. Says Joe Moore: "He paid next to nothing for it—about $3,000—and he got his money back the first year on timber. His aim was to make all the money he could off it." Such an aim is one that Joe, himself a proudly acquisitive type ("I'm stingy. I like to make money."), can passionately admire.