IN the preceding chapters the mouldboard plough has been shown to be the villain of the world's agricultural drama. In the United States it is suspected of wasting, from the ploughsole, enough plant food to sustain crops with which to feed half the other peoples of the world—a suspicion based upon official reports. Elsewhere the record is less clearly defined; for nowhere else are mouldboards of the sizes common in the United States in general use. The "bigger and better" the plough, the more devastating its effect.
When this assessment of the plough has become official, as eventually it must, American agriculture will undergo drastic revision. It is hardly possible to make a blueprint, or even to hint at one, in terms more trustworthy than the usual perspective of greener pastures elsewhere. In this spirit, therefore, I under-take now to forecast some of the changes that are likely to result from the new agricultural scheme.
The pastures of the land will be greener, literally; crops will grow in better fashion, with immeasurably less attention than they have customarily been given in the past; the vitamins and minerals our foods used to contain in abundance will again be present in similar measure; and in consequence we shall undoubtedly be healthier, some of the tensions of civilization will be relaxed, and our lives should be more comfortable.
This is the favourable aspect of the picture. That the benefits will not be the same for all people, especially in the initial phases of change, is a perfectly admissible deduction from history. Technological change always brings temporary maladjustments; from the individual standpoint, they may even be considered disasters. Thus, when we begin to apply our new agricultural principles, which acknowledge the co-operation of the eternal forces of growth against which we have hitherto been working, many people will be adversely affected. The position of some of them will be made almost completely untenable, until the wisdom of government has found a satisfactory solution.
The swiftest and most perceptible disturbance will occur in the economic field — specifically, the price structure of unprocessed farm commodities. As soon as crop yields several times as great per acre as our customary averages begin to come into the world's markets, prices will decline. This does not mean necessarily that those who practice the new agronomy will be the losers; their cost of production will be so low that their position will be greatly improved. It does mean, however, that those who do not take advantage of the new methods will suffer, and those who are now considered marginal producers will fail entirely.
Moreover, renewed thought will have to be given to the so-called economy of abundance. There is such a thing as an upper limit to the amount of food that can be consumed by the population of the United States and by the now undernourished populations elsewhere in the world. For this reason, as the new methods of agriculture are applied generally, it may be found necessary to reduce the acreages devoted to staple food crops. It is not at all unlikely that the farmer whose land produced five times as much the first year, under the new methods, may realize a tenfold increase the second on the same land. Such possibilities preclude any prompt and completely effective economic curbs by acreage reduction. What would the farmer do with the acres withdrawn from the production of the given crop ? Up to this time he has been told to devote the surplus acres to land-improving crops. If the basic principle of the new agricultural method proposed in this book is recalled, it will be clearly seen that the older methods of land improvement do not apply. Hence the impasse that appears when we resort to traditional methods of meeting the threat of crop surpluses.
Part of the result will be that the chemurgists are given an opportunity to take over and find economic uses for large areas of land that will not be needed for the production of food crops. Since, under the methods proposed in this book, the land so utilized will produce raw materials for the chemurgist at a mere fraction of the previous cost, vast opportunities are open to those who perfect and bring into production the countless products and commodities for which there will be a ready market among producers and consumers of fabricated goods.
In this connection, it must be remembered that we have literally been living on borrowed time. Consider the rate of the use of forests. If we have used far more timber than Nature can allow us for such traditional things as we know, it is likely that the new uses which have been developed in the last ten years will exhaust our available timber at an even greater rate. The out look for wood plastics is very intimately connected with the prospect that, under newer agricultural practice releasing land from food crops, we shall have areas which can profitably be returned to woodland.
Petroleum reserves, too, have been distributed with a lavish hand. That our large coal reserves might supplement our dwindling oil reservoirs is scarcely as happy a thought as the possibility that surplus lands may be used for the production of materials easily distilled into fuels. And from this comes the easy corollary that the waste products from the refiner's retorts might be restored to the land as fertilizer. We should then experience a condition which the world has never before known in connection with the land - soil cropped annually without loss of virtue. For it should be clear by now, from the contents of this book, that cropping can build soil instead of destroying it.
Other influences will operate to modify the American land-scape. With the invention of suitable mechanical equipment for use by the suburbanite in coaxing from his home site the foods his family needs, a gentle transformation of urbanites into suburbanites may be expected. There is nothing new about this, of course, except that what has heretofore been a fancy which could be indulged only by the well-placed may be open to the many. Thus, the decentralization of populations, urged for reasons of individual health and efficiency by industrialists and for reasons of defence by military authorities, may well become a reality. The beneficial effects on American civilization are sufficiently apparent to obviate any need to discuss them.
It is not enough that we should have in prospect supplies of food which would eliminate man's historic worry about shortages. With cheap production of foodstuffs, we should be able to look forward to the lowest-cost standard of living. We in America have hitherto boasted of our " high standard of living," but we have neglected to interpret that claim in the light of what our achievement has cost us. Food and other products of agriculture have figured prominently in the high costs of our present living standard. There is an intimate connection, moreover, between the cost of man's bread and the cost of everything else he produces. Despite the rejection by economists and humanitarians (and justly so) of the so-called subsistence theory of wages, perhaps insufficient thought has been devoted to the disproportionate expenditures for the products of the soil and the relation of these to costs of operation in every other field of human activity.
If all the other benefits to be derived from a revitalized agricultural method could be dismissed, the one which would attract us still is the physical well-being of man himself. Foods are the sources of the vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, and minerals by which man lives. He thrives or he fares ill in proportion to the availability of these essentials in the foods which are supplied him from the farms and gardens of the land. Agronomists as well as nutritionists are aware that lands which have been exhausted of their essentials produce foodstuffs which are deficient in the end-products required by human beings.
It is not too much to expect that, by the restoration of the vital ingredients needed by our lands for the production of lush, vigorous, healthy crops, the vitality of man himself may be enormously enhanced, his deficiency diseases greatly reduced or eliminated, and his life expectancy increased. This result, if no other were envisaged, would be adequate justification for a " new " agriculture which is in reality very old.
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