Word: farmed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Farmer North was through with a job that would have taken five men half a day working with buckets and pitchforks. He was ready to indulge his hobby. He returned to his farmhouse and poured himself another cup of coffee. While it cooled, he read a story on the "farm problem" in the Wall Street Journal. Carrying his cup and a cigarette, he walked into his living room, 40 feet long and beige-carpeted wall to wall. It was dominated at the far end by a two-story pipe organ flanked by two electronic organs and a grand piano. Farmer...
Symbol & Example. Farmer North is a symbol-and a prime example-of the profound changes that have been wrought in U.S. agriculture by mechanization and automation, plus the new use of fertilizers. In the last 20 years, farming has changed more radically than in the previous two centuries. Once farmers used to dole out fertilizer thinking only of how much it cost them. Now they pour it on by the carload, confident of getting back bigger profits at harvest time. Farm use of fertilizer has risen in 20 years from 1,500,000 tons to 6,200,000 tons...
Whether the U.S. can much longer afford the huge surpluses being piled up by this efficiency is doubted by most farm experts. Even if the support scandal continues, there is something for U.S. taxpayers to be cheerful about. Rising efficiency keeps down the cost of food. The mountainous grain surplus currently is causing a build-up in cattle-breeding-pointing to an eventual price break...
...mechanization and automation developed by the U.S. farmer can show the world how to solve the food shortages brought on by the explosion in population. In the next decade, the most important U.S. export may well be the lessons that Farmer North and others learned down on the farm...
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...