Year of Abundance

From every U.S. county, from Cape Cod's cranberry bogs to California's orange groves, the Agriculture Department's busy farm agents mailed in their annual reports. They told a story of great fertility, great abundance. The land was still good. For all the mistakes unthinking men had visited on it, it was still good land, the best possession of a great nation. The reports told how:

In January 1942 the U.S. has its greatest supply of food in all history. A two-year store of wheat lies heavy in the big concrete granaries of Chicago and Minneapolis, in the steel bins, like sawed-off oil tanks, which dot the Midwestern countryside. Rude, slatted corn cribs groan from overloading as well as frost: the U.S. has enough corn for 18 months.

In cold storage, from the squat, thick-walled ice houses of villages to the glistening refrigerator plants of big cities, are record stocks of vegetables, fruits, eggs, butter and cheese, frozen chickens, near-record stocks of beef, pork, slabs of lard. Stored in farmers' dirt-walled cellars, or in the basements of city groceries, is a profusion of potatoes, cabbages, onions, apples, turnips, rutabagas, yams.

Even in midwinter, the land does not hold back its wealth. In Florida it is harvest season. Men & women in straw hats swarm over beanfields and sugar-cane plantations; trucks churn through fields to pick up oranges and grapefruit; the strawberry crop moves out by the carload; small farmers ride to town in wagons brimming with cucumbers, squash, eggplant. In Texas' Rio Grande Valley it is harvest time for grapefruit and cabbage, for tomatoes, spinach, broccoli, peppers, carrots and beets.

In Wisconsin's dairy country, tank trucks lug thousands of gallons of milk in their stainless steel bellies, to plants where it is turned to butter and cheese, or condensed and powdered for storing. In Iowa, where more than 2,000,000 sows will farrow in the spring, farmers have begun to think about the hog shelters they will have to slap together, of boards in the shape of inverted Vs or lean-tos thrown against fence corners. Everywhere barns are piled high with hay, oats, alfalfa and corn to feed the new crop of pigs and calves.

In Europe and the Far East men are starving, but the U.S. is still blessed with abundance, and the land has not yet been put to its utmost test. There is still a margin, for shipments of food to the U.S.'s allies, for replacement of oils which once came from the Far East. Agriculture Secretary Claude R. Wickard, who had announced the greatest farm program in history only last September, has revised his goals and announced others still bigger. This year the land will be asked for more & more of its wealth. And the land will respond.

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