In The Dell

By R.Z. Sheppard

FARM by Richard Rhodes

Simon & Schuster

336 pages; $19.95

Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) won every major American prize for nonfiction. Having written well on the most terrible weapon ever used in war, Rhodes evidently has decided to beat his words into plowshares.

Farm gets as close to the sweat and slim profit margins of an uncertain occupation as any suburban slicker could imagine. Rhodes says he filled 42 notebooks during working visits to Tom Bauer's Missouri farm, and he seems to have used every detail from them, including the squeal of Bauer's hogs.

Bauer is a pseudonym that is also German for farmer. The man could easily have been portrayed as larger than life. His strength, character, knowledge and skills are that impressive. Rhodes takes the all-in-a-day's-work approach, except that most of the workdays seem to be 20 hours long. Tom and wife Sally are awakened by the 6 a.m. farm reports: "They listened to hog and cattle and grain prices and then planned the day's business, sometimes with a little monkey business thrown in."

Sweet are the uses of efficiency. One of the pleasures of this near perfect piece of reportage is the sense that both writer and subject waste little motion. Fighting the clock, the calendar and the fiscal year, Bauer needs more than his seed cap. A mechanic's lid, a diplomat's Homburg and a gambler's eyeshade would come in handy.

By today's fast-buck standards, farming is a sucker bet. The risks greatly outweigh the rewards, unless, like Bauer, you count looking up from your chores to watch a flight of geese or down at some of the richest soil in the world. According to Sally's accounting, the year Rhodes hung around was so-so: the family netted $19,000 on a gross income of $152,090.34.

Roughly 90% of this book is about being busy: growing the grain, raising livestock, negotiating with banks, handling paperwork and fixing the combine. When he gets down to nuts and bolts, Rhodes is the Tom Clancy of farm machinery.

A deer hunt provides a change from the routine hazards of farming. Accompanying Bauer and his friends is an anonymous character known as "the city man" -- almost certainly Rhodes himself -- who accidently discharges his rifle. The bullet passes through the windshield of a truck and the crown of the driver's cap before channeling into the roof of the cab. It is a chilling moment, one in which to give thanks for a tragedy luckily averted and thanks that Rhodes was not similarly careless when reporting on the atom bomb.