Crops and Prospects

Last fortnight Wallaces' Farmer and Iowa Homestead printed the story of the Renshaws. Mr. and Mrs. Renshaw and their three children live on a farm in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa. The farm business was bad three years ago, and the Renshaws' luck was worse. After 30 years on the farm, Mr. Renshaw was about to lose his land by foreclosure. He got cancer of the face. All his horses died. He broke his arm. His car went to pot. He had to sell his hogs for practically nothing. When the subject of patriotism came up at school, his son James, 14, said the hell with the U. S. and The Star-Spangled Banner. The loan company foreclosed, and the Renshaws had to pay rent to keep on living on their own farm. Mrs. Renshaw broke her collarbone, and Doris, 12, and Iris, 11, had to do all the housework and tend the chickens.

By the time the paper looked into the case of the Renshaws, they were doing well again. Wallaces' Farmer ("Henry A. Wallace, Editor, on leave of absence as Secretary of Agriculture") noted with pleasure that a Government loan plus plenty of pluck had enabled Mr. Renshaw to have his cancer treated, buy more livestock, retrieve his farm. "The Lord helps those who help themselves, and we have tried to make the best of what we have," said Mrs. Renshaw.

Last week the names of a lot of people like the Renshaws (with or without the Renshaw luck and pluck) appeared in the U. S. press. Some 125,000 of the 32,000,000 who live on U. S. farms had themselves a time at the 40th International Live Stock Exposition, the 18th National 4-H-Club Congress, the 21st American Farm Bureau Federation Convention, many a simultaneous farmfest in Chicago.

"I shore ain't surprised," said lank, rawboned Mayfield Kothmann, 18, from Mason County, Texas, when his red-&-white Hereford, Lucky Boy II, was adjudged grand champion steer at the Exposition. Miss Clara Nell Lavender, 18, of Jefferson, Ga., had canned 4,976 pints of fruits, vegetables, juices, jams, jellies and pickles, thereby winning 4-H kudos. Declared healthiest 4-H specimens were "four strong boys and two comely girls" (Warren Cales, 18, Sandstone, W. Va.; Richard Crane, 17, Rushville, Ind.; Carlisle Klein, 18, Black River Falls, Wis.; Leslie Warrant, 16, Kasota, Minn.; Ruth Fitzenreiter, 16, Bel, La., and Joann Parks. 15. Liberty, Ind.). An invigorating press release announced that all six drink milk and eat plenty of vegetables, added pointedly that five drink "no coffee" (exception: Joann).

Bedded and shown on the acres and acres of floor space in the International Amphitheatre at Chicago's stockyards were 13,340 combed, brushed, manicured, lowing, squealing, braying, baaing cattle, horses, sheep, swine. Canadian exhibitors were there in force, World War II having canceled out their Royal Winter Fair in Toronto.

Life on the Farm was fair to middling in 1939. "Tain't good, but tain't bad." Henry Wallace's economists estimate cash farm income for the year at $8,300,000,000 (including $675,000,000 in U. S. bounties) --$280,000,000 up from 1938. Farmers generally got a little more for their wares than they got last year (notable exception: hogs were far down). But the plaguing, persistent core of "the farm problem" remained the same. Measured by their favorite yardstick--the price level of 1910-14--farmers paid about 22% more for what they had to buy than they got for what they sold. So they cry for guaranteed "parity" between their selling and buying prices, and 1940-minded Republicans promise to heed.

In Bismarck and Omaha and Sapulpa, all along the western tier of the Great Plains, the talk was again of drought this year, and of dust to come. The rotting crumble of soil--agronomists call it "desiccation"--athirst for rain, is sure to powder (unless water falls) and billow into clouds more dreadful than those which darkened the Dust Bowl three years ago. In South Dakota,, parts of North Dakota, western Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and central Oklahoma, drought has already blasted the corn (though not sufficiently to dint U. S. and world surpluses). One result: the U. S. beef herds on the move are unusually large. From western ranges, where the feed is scanty, cattle are moving by the hungry thousands to corn-rich Missouri, Iowa and eastern Kansas, there to be stuffed and sleeked for market.

As far east as New York, south into the Mississippi Valley, the threat of drought made news. Most anxious of all were wheat growers, concerned for their 1940 crops. Early sprouts of winter wheat (planted one year for harvest the next) are dying in western Kansas and Oklahoma, famishing elsewhere on the plains. But wheat prices were up, around $1, and wheat farmers could not be wholly chapfallen with the prospect of dollar wheat.

*For: Head, Heart, Hands, Health.

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