Word: farmerly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...successful farmer today must understand enough engineering and science to participate in a technological upheaval that is changing the very shape of the land and the nature of his crops. Says Lawrence Rappaport, chairman of the department of vegetable crops at the University of California at Davis: "Agriculture is now in perpetual revolution, and there is no end in sight." People flying over the West and Midwest see an unusual pattern on the terrain below: not the familiar farm land with checkerboard squares, but large polka dots, the result of costly ($50,000 each) center-pivot irrigation machines that automatically...
Because of the technological revolution, one farmer in the U.S. now feeds 59 people. Elsewhere, the ratio of total population to the number of farmers and farm laborers is 19.2 in Western Europe, 13.7 in Japan, a mere 10 in the Soviet Union. U.S. agriculture feeds people well and cheaply too. The average American intake of more than 3,000 calories per day is among the highest in the world, and though citizens of some other nations match the U.S. in calories, probably none do in variety of diet...
...home, the necessity for the successful farmer to become a financier-salesman-engineer-scientist has accelerated a rural social revolution. Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz vigorously preached the virtues of large-scale efficient farming, a message often translated in the croplands into five blunt words: Get big or get out. The decline in U.S. farm population that has been under way at least since 1910 has speeded up in recent years. By April 1977, only 1 of every 28 Americans lived on a farm, vs. 1 in 21 in 1970 and 1 in 3 early in the century...
...been expanding ever since he joined his father Edwin, now 67 and retired, as a full-time farmer in 1951 after two years at Moorhead (Minn.) State University. The Benedict family, originally from France (the first known ancestor came to colonial America after a stopover in England in the early 1700s), has been farming since Pat's great-grandfather moved to Minnesota from Wisconsin shortly after the Civil War. During the Depression the homestead shrank from 1,000 acres to 400 and father Edwin had to hunt partridges to help feed the family. But post-World War II prosperity enabled...
...harvest time when beets must be ground up quickly before they rot. Recalls Pat: "We were at the mercy of people a thousand miles away who just were not concerned with our needs." So Benedict, as a director of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association, organized 1,600 farmers to put up $20 million in cash, borrow another $47 million and buy out the company. Now they run the mills, sell sugar directly to industrial users and have access to a company computer that provides each farmer-investor with a detailed analysis of his beet fields for the past...