Land Army

Fickle Kansas was at her bright-green best. From boundary to boundary winter wheat stretched like an unending bluegrass lawn. In the fields fat cattle grazed, their square beefsteak buttocks glistening in the sun. Farmers had almost forgotten the days when prosperity meant breaking even. Now they drove recent automobiles through land that was moist three feet down.

The western Kansas farmer could remember when dust blew in the front keyhole faster than his wife could sweep it out the back door, when he was down to his last milk cow, and there were no crops in the fields. Now Kansas was a granary again; if the weather stayed good, Kansas would furnish more than a quarter of the nation's 625,000,000-bushel winter-wheat harvest.

But a new shortage plagued the farmer. In Dust Bowl years, Kansas had nearly twice as much farm labor as the burned-up crops needed. Now the men were gone: off to armament factories, off to the Army. In July, when the wheat is waist-high and golden ripe, where will the hired hands be found?

All over the U.S., farmers faced the same problem. New York's Assembly passed a bill excusing schoolchildren for a month of farm work. Kentucky decided to parole petty offenders from its prisons to the fields. Maryland got 100 farm hands in ten days by threatening to jail idlers under a World War I "work or fight" law. Farmers everywhere looked toward the cities, for merchants and clerks who could help out in a pinch.

In Washington the U.S. Employment Service announced the longest and likeliest step: the impending registration of women willing to take farm jobs. With crops growing green and men busy with war, the farmerette may come back. If the U.S. was to feed the world, it must have a Land Army.

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