(6 of 9)
"I Love You." His studying done, Joe crawls into bed, reads a chapter or more of his Bible and rereads that day's letter from his girl, Ann Huffines, of nearby Rough Point, now away at David Lipscomb College in Nashville. Wrote Ann recently: "Hope you are all right and that your work is coming along all right. I surely do think about you and wish I could see you. The convention in Kansas City is not far away, I'm really excited about going. Guess I'll close for now. Be careful. I love you." Replied Joe: "Well, I have been having some bulldozing work done trying to clean up a little pasture land. Don't guess I'll have too much more done, being as it's expensive." He often falls asleep in mid-letter.
Joe Moore's day has been a full and satisfying one, well-paced, productive, and shaped for efficiency. It requires a real planner to conceive and carry out such a day; modern farming is no job for the amateur, the incompetent, the haphazard or the lazy. Today's farmer must invest in tractors and other expensive labor-saving equipment. A poor manager has too much to lose and too many ways to lose it.
Young Joe Moore has few worries about losing money this year. With any luck at all, he expects to net from $8,000 to $10,000. Young though he is, Joe has spent many a year learning what a Tennessee farmer needs to know to make that kind of money.
The Rule of Thumb. Basic to Joe Moore's childhood was the ownership of livestock. Beginning when he was four, Joe and his sister, Donneita, shared ownership of lambs deserted by their mothers, feeding them by bottle until they were old enough to go on grass. Already, Joe's hearty appetite for cold cash was apparent: he even made a tidy profit out of his habit of sucking his thumb. For months, both his mother and grandmother put dimes under his pillow every time he went to sleep without his thumb in his mouth. Finally grandmother Carver said: "Joe, this has gone far enough. We'll just have to stop giving you money." Replied Joe: "If you do, I'll keep right on sucking my thumb." And so he did, until he was in the second grade and decided that he wanted more than anything on earth a Jersey cow that had been offered to his father as payment for a debt. When Joe pleaded to have the cow, his father said: "You can have her if you quit sucking your thumb. None of us must ever see you with your thumb in your mouth again." No one ever did—and "Old Jersey" was kept by Joe as a calf producer and milk cow until she died three years ago.
In grade school, Joe joined the 4-H Club, which, like the Future Farmers, has trained many a fine young farmer (the 4-H Club, with membership of more than 2,000,000, differs from the F.F.A. mainly in taking both boys and girls and in not being tied so directly to high school vocational agriculture). Joe, at the suggestion of his 4-H supervisor, bought a black steer, fed it for five months, and took it to the Nashville Fat Cattle Show, where it did badly. Back home, determined to do better, Joe bought a registered Duroc gilt, then set out to buy some good purebred cattle. He was on his way to a career as a farmer—but a glittering alternative beckoned, just as similarly glittering alternatives have beckoned other farm boys and taken them from the country to the city.