AGRICULTURE: The Closest Thing to the Lord

(See Cover)

In Kansas City’s sprawling Municipal Auditorium one night last week, 10,000 blue-jacketed youths sat tense and quiet as an announcement was made from the stage. Then, as they came to their feet in a blaze of applause, a 119-piece band blared a fanfare, and a dozen spotlights lanced through the darkened arena to center on a wiry, suddenly pale young man who stood awkwardly rubbing the sweat from his palms. Joe Moore, who runs a farm near Liberty, about halfway between the communities of Accident and Nameless in Tennessee’s Cumberland foothills, had just been named 1955’s Star Farmer of America.

The Star Farmer award is the highest that can come to one of the 383,000 members of the Future Farmers of America, a voluntary organization that includes more than 95% of all U.S. high-school boys taking vocational agriculture courses. Since it was founded in 1928, the F.F.A., along with the 4-H Clubs, has trained the farm youth in the science of his profession, taught him to use and live with his machines, given him a strength of pride in his calling and a broadened outlook at the world about him. Yesterday’s F.F.A. leaders have helped bring U.S. agriculture to the most bountiful state ever known to any civilization, and in so serving their nation they have served themselves. Examples: 1938’s Star Farmer, Hunter Roy Greenlaw, found himself at 16, when his father died, running his family farm near Fredericksburg, Va.; he has built up his property from 385 acres and a few dairy cattle to nearly 800 acres and a herd of 200 Herefords. James Henry Thompson of Salem, Ore., Star Farmer in 1942, originally paid $15,000 for the property he now values at $55,000, lives in a modern ranch-style house. Ray Gene Cinnamon, of Garber, Okla., Star Farmer in 1947, began as a sheepherder, now operates an 800-acre farm and owns a producing oil well. Today’s F.F.A. leaders, building on the experience of their predecessors, have even greater opportunities.

The F.F.A. judges, in selecting north central Tennessee’s Joe Moore last week, went mostly by statistics. Even in this limited context, the record was imposing: Joe farms 505 acres, of which he owns 85; he rents the rest from his father, a fertilizer salesman, for $1,150 (plus three butchered hogs and a calf) a year. He has bought nearly $15,000 worth of equipment, ranging from a $2,800 John Deere tractor to a $125 mule-drawn wagon. His livestock is valued at more than $16,000 and includes 71 head of beef cattle, 30 of them fine purebred Aberdeen-Angus, plus seven registered Duroc-Jersey sows and about 80 sheep. He has won more than 170 prizes at local, county, state and national fairs and expositions. In all, Joe has complete managerial responsibility for a $49,000 farm business. His net worth is $37,000. Another statistic: he has just turned 21.

Joe Moore is one of 4,000,000 U.S. farmers, a group so varied as to thwart the sociologists’ search for a “typical” member. Yet mid-century U.S. farmers in general have characteristics of working and living that set them apart from farmers of other lands and times. The world (including the recently visiting Russians) marvels at U.S. farm production. How American farmers do it is a mystery, even to most of their compatriots. The secret: they preserve individualism and personal enterprise while embracing a thousand forms of cooperative effort, from federal price supports down—or up—to such voluntary organizations as the F.F.A. Joe Moore’s story is a part of the secret.

Beginning in Darkness. Just a few days before Joe left for Kansas City to attend the annual Future Farmers’ convention, the Chromaster clock sounded its alarm at 4:30 a.m. in his bedroom at home. Shocked to wakefulness after eight hours of sleep, Joe swung out his bare feet and reached for the mound of khaki clothes on the linoleum floor. The shirt, clammy from three days’ accumulated sweat, clung dankly to him. The pants, crusted with dirt and splotched with tractor grease, slipped on over the cotton print shorts in which he had slept. The three-hook farm shoes, their sides eaten by barnyard acids, stayed untied as he clomped to the door of his parents’ bedroom and hallooed to wake his mother.

Outside, Joe knelt in the dew-laden Bermuda grass, tied his shoe laces, then swung off in easy, economical strides toward the neat, white smokehouse. There, ducking under three Tennessee hams and some sides of smoked fatback, he filled a five-gallon grease bucket with wheat shorts, crimped oats and water to make a slop for the four Duroc sows that were nursing their first litters in the orchard lot. To the hog troughs he took the shortest route, leading through the family cemetery behind the house. As the wire gate clicked shut behind him, Joe passed by the chest-high tombstone of his great-grandfather, Samuel Sampson Carver (1847-1938), symbol of a farm era that, although gone, still presses its influence on Joe Moore and all his contemporaries.

Energy & Erosion. Sam Carver, a fourth-generation native of Jackson County, Tenn., returned from a Union prison after the Civil War, gathered together what money he had, borrowed some more, bought about 800 acres along Dry Fork Branch, near Liberty, and set out with grim energy to wring his living from the land. Says Joe Moore: “He paid next to nothing for it—about $3,000—and he got his money back the first year on timber. His aim was to make all the money he could off it.” Such an aim is one that Joe, himself a proudly acquisitive type (“I’m stingy. I like to make money.”), can passionately admire.

But Joe, the product of a different day, finds less to respect in some of Sam’s methods, because “He didn’t think much about the people coming along after him.” Old Sam cut down most of the virgin timber on his farm, snaked it out by mules to his own sawmills, then ripped into the job of converting the land into dollars, fast and plentiful. He brought in eight tenant farmers—Joe does nicely with three farm hands—and urged them to plow the steep hillsides year after year, planting corn in any and all directions without regard for erosion. Sam Carver was no throwback; he was, if anything, more progressive than most farmers of his generation. But he one-cropped from the earth its precious skin of humus-filled soil and, when he had finished, left it packed with barren red clay fit only for blackberry briars and bodock bushes that grew in tangled profusion.

Great-grandfather Carver was the last real farmer his family was to produce—until Joe Moore, with an intense desire to restore the land to richness, came along. Joe is a living contradiction to the widespread—and wrong—explanation of U.S. farm productivity: the notion that the U.S. has “new” and naturally hyper-fertile soil. Joe successfully farms acres that would make a Polish peasant blanch with dismay. Yet he devoutly believes that his rocky slopes “can be made to grow good crops—just as good as the flat land, or maybe even better, with enough work. I’ll make them grow everything they can, and I’ll take care of them.” Taking care of them means poring over his soil-conservation folder, the most precious document on his farm, which he never lets out of his keeping. It includes his soil-test figures (he can get free tests done either by the Tennessee state laboratories or by a fertilizer company that offers the service), a chart of his program for terracing and contouring and planting, and an aerial photo-mosaic with contour and field lines superimposed. So far, Joe has put in 4,000 ft. of terraces and drainage ditches, converted about 90 acres from thicket to permanent pasture.

Penicillin & Sulfa. Joe’s mind, however, was on more immediate matters, as he moved through the early morning ground mists from the cemetery to the orchard lot, where he poured the slop into two troughs and heard the chup-chop of the sows’ jaws. Glad to get away from the smell of the hoghouse, Joe waded through high grass and weeds to what was once a brooder house. He hefted a two-bushel bag of mixed feed and poured most of it into a trough for his non-purebred calves. Stepping back, he gauged with practiced eye each calf’s enthusiasm for the mixture. Such attention pays off: only a few days before, he had spotted a white-faced black steer (a grade cross between Hereford and Angus) mincing at the feed. Although the calf’s nose was not running, Joe figured it might have a cold, or, worse yet, be “one of them that just never does eat like he oughta.” With the help of his old high-school vocational agriculture teacher, who substitutes in a poor county for a graduate veterinarian, Joe took the steer’s temperature, found it four degrees above the normal of 101° Fahrenheit. He and the teacher purged the calf with laxative, hypoed it with penicillin, and in a few days it was back with the other young feeders.

Joe’s next pre-sunup chore was an esthetic delight; it dealt with 20 top-quality Angus steers soon to be translated into dollars and cents at the Tennessee Fat Cattle Show. Joe snapped on the lights in the main barn, climbed into the loft and scooped measured feed mixtures into the chute leading to the cattle shed below.

Swinging down from the loft, Joe took a shaker of sulfa powder to the barn’s northeast stall and tenderly dusted the mangled ankle flesh of a calf. A few weeks before, the calf had been taken away from its mother, one of Joe’s six milk cows. First night away, the weaning calf tried to climb the wall of a barn stall. Next morning Joe found the struggling animal hanging by its right forefoot, caught high in a crack and badly cut. Old Sam Carver, neighbors remember, had hands as gentle as Joe’s—but Sam had never had any sulfa and, very probably, would have lost the calf.

While Zoni Williamson, Joe’s ancient Negro farmhand, milked some cows, Joe walked out to the farrowing barn that he built while he was still in high school. In one of the six concrete-floored stalls lay a monstrous (upwards of 600 lbs.) Duroc sow with eleven week-old pigs. She gave a grunting roar as Joe eased a trough past her jaws to the floor and filled it with slop from a bucket. Joe worked carefully, talking softly: a sow with new pigs is one of the farm’s most dangerous animals, both to humans and to her pigs. If not fed with supplement containing tankage, a sow may indulge in the money-losing practice of eating her young.

The Slugabed. Half an hour after his alarm clock went off, Joe was back at the kitchen door, wiping his shoes on the grass. It was only half an hour before sunrise—and again there is a change to be noted in life on the American farm. Getting up sometimes at 4:30, generally at 5, and occasionally lolling in bed until 6, Joe Moore would have been considered a slugabed by his great-grandfather, who, out of the necessity of his era, turned out at an invariable 4 a.m. When a man is working three to ten farmhands, as Sam Carver did, he must act as a sort of platoon leader, setting a disciplined example so as not to leave his labor force drifting around idle. Joe Moore, who could not find ten available farmhands in his area even if he needed them, can afford some flexibility.

This flexibility lasts throughout the day, which Joe can fill in numberless planned ways, from stripping tobacco to hauling feed in his truck, from supervising the work of a bulldozer, hired for $10 an hour, to stretching fence. The midday quitting time is 11:30 and, after a big meal, Joe stretches out on the parlor floor (which saves taking off pants and shoes to lie on a bed) for a half-hour nap to “let my eats settle.” By 12:30 he is back at work. Ordinarily he stops at 6 or 7 o’clock, but in “pinchin’ times” he often mans an after-supper shift, and the buckety-buck of his tractor can be heard until 10 or 11.

Family Circle. On the Moore farm, supper is the main time for the family. At the table will be Joe’s grandmother Carver, who lives in a first-floor room of the big white house and knits delicate white bedspreads for her young relatives. There on a visit may be Joe’s married sister, Mrs. Donneita Lampley. At the supper table too will be Joe’s mother, pert, determined Thelma Ashley Carver Moore, now 44, who, in addition to her heavy household duties, holds down the job of Jackson County School Supervisor. She still finds time, once a year, to pack her husband into a car and go on a long trip (several years ago Joe quit going along, but he has been in Canada, Mexico, and 36 states). At the head of the table, if he is not out on the road on his selling job, will be Joe’s father, Donald Moore, 48, a patient, understanding man. Born on a poor little 120-acre farm over at Falling Waters in Putnam County, Donald was squeezed out of farming by the size of his family. He went to work selling Bibles—three different editions for teachers, three for home use and, along with them, a discreet book on sex fundamentals. By the time he married Thelma Carver, Donald had a job selling “Checkerboard” feeds for Ralston Purina, later was hired by the Armour Fertilizer Works, for which he is now district sales manager. Perhaps because he never had a chance to do much of it, Donald loved farming—a love that he passed on to his son.

At dinner, grace is said by either Donald or Joe, in conversational man-to-man tones: “Father, we thank Thee for this day and particularly for this food. Go with us through the further part of this night. Amen.” The meal is hearty. A typical menu: fried chicken, pole beans with lots of shelled ones mixed among the snaps, whippoorwills (brown peas), okra (fixed in a “made-up” dish with corn-bread crumbs and meats, so as to remove the slickness), corn, sweet potatoes, candied pears, eggbread sticks, biscuits, cake and ice cream. Most of the food is produced on the farm—but the milk comes straight from the Lebanon dairy, a fact that would have shocked the farmers of Sam Carver’s generation. Joe (with a well-educated eye on the long-term balances of farm economics, insists that he be left free to sell all his milk to the cheese factory or, more rewarding still, let his calves suck longer, thereby adding precious pounds.

Only one night a week—Tuesday at 8 o’clock for The $64,000 Question—does Joe join the rest of the family after supper around the television set. Other nights he goes straight to his room to work over his ledgers or to study one or more of the hundreds of Government bulletins, F.F.A. information sheets, farm papers or textbooks that are available to him. On the wall above his desk are tacked the green sheets of weekly feed prices that he gets from a feed company. On a stool in his bathroom is a copy of the Farm Journal. All these are part of a vast farm communications network that has made the modern U.S. farmer the best informed and most up-to-date in the world.

“I Love You.” His studying done, Joe crawls into bed, reads a chapter or more of his Bible and rereads that day’s letter from his girl, Ann Huffines, of nearby Rough Point, now away at David Lipscomb College in Nashville. Wrote Ann recently: “Hope you are all right and that your work is coming along all right. I surely do think about you and wish I could see you. The convention in Kansas City is not far away, I’m really excited about going. Guess I’ll close for now. Be careful. I love you.” Replied Joe: “Well, I have been having some bulldozing work done trying to clean up a little pasture land. Don’t guess I’ll have too much more done, being as it’s expensive.” He often falls asleep in mid-letter.

Joe Moore’s day has been a full and satisfying one, well-paced, productive, and shaped for efficiency. It requires a real planner to conceive and carry out such a day; modern farming is no job for the amateur, the incompetent, the haphazard or the lazy. Today’s farmer must invest in tractors and other expensive labor-saving equipment. A poor manager has too much to lose and too many ways to lose it.

Young Joe Moore has few worries about losing money this year. With any luck at all, he expects to net from $8,000 to $10,000. Young though he is, Joe has spent many a year learning what a Tennessee farmer needs to know to make that kind of money.

The Rule of Thumb. Basic to Joe Moore’s childhood was the ownership of livestock. Beginning when he was four, Joe and his sister, Donneita, shared ownership of lambs deserted by their mothers, feeding them by bottle until they were old enough to go on grass. Already, Joe’s hearty appetite for cold cash was apparent: he even made a tidy profit out of his habit of sucking his thumb. For months, both his mother and grandmother put dimes under his pillow every time he went to sleep without his thumb in his mouth. Finally grandmother Carver said: “Joe, this has gone far enough. We’ll just have to stop giving you money.” Replied Joe: “If you do, I’ll keep right on sucking my thumb.” And so he did, until he was in the second grade and decided that he wanted more than anything on earth a Jersey cow that had been offered to his father as payment for a debt. When Joe pleaded to have the cow, his father said: “You can have her if you quit sucking your thumb. None of us must ever see you with your thumb in your mouth again.” No one ever did—and “Old Jersey” was kept by Joe as a calf producer and milk cow until she died three years ago.

In grade school, Joe joined the 4-H Club, which, like the Future Farmers, has trained many a fine young farmer (the 4-H Club, with membership of more than 2,000,000, differs from the F.F.A. mainly in taking both boys and girls and in not being tied so directly to high school vocational agriculture). Joe, at the suggestion of his 4-H supervisor, bought a black steer, fed it for five months, and took it to the Nashville Fat Cattle Show, where it did badly. Back home, determined to do better, Joe bought a registered Duroc gilt, then set out to buy some good purebred cattle. He was on his way to a career as a farmer—but a glittering alternative beckoned, just as similarly glittering alternatives have beckoned other farm boys and taken them from the country to the city.

Perhaps as a recurrence of thumb-sucking in a higher form, Joe thought long and seriously about becoming a professional pop singer. For as far back as he could remember, he and Donneita had sung in the parlor while Thelma Moore beat out tunes on the upright piano. As a duet, Joe and Donneita appeared on a Cookeville radio station program and at Rotary club and other similar gatherings in the area. A Sinatra-type baritone, Joe made his first trip to Kansas City to sing at the national F.F.A. convention there. For the fact that he is not today draping himself around nightspot microphones, he can thank the Future Farmers of America.

Breaking the Complex. Almost as a matter of course, Joe joined the F.F.A. when he entered high school in Gainesboro. Under his vocational agriculture teacher, Robert (“Woofie”) Fox, Joe began studying the schoolbook side of modern farming: crop rotation, contour plowing, terracing, grass and grain mixtures for good cover crops, soil testing, plant foods, livestock bacteria, basic veterinary practice. In shop class, Joe learned how to build hog feeders and cattle chutes, how to wire a barn for electricity, how to hang gates, how to solder and weld, and how to care for his machines. (Lesson I: “Grease is cheaper than bearings.”)

From the F.F.A. Joe learned that there is a lot more to modern farming than the techniques of handling plants and animals. In F.F.A. public-speaking and essay contests, he learned to organize his thoughts and express them clearly. In his F.F.A. meetings he became familiar with parliamentary rules of order and fundamentals of self-government. In his trips to national conventions he came to know and understand farm boys from Maine and California, from Hawaii and from Puerto Rico. Says Joe of his benefits from the F.F.A.: “It’s an ideal training ground for qualities like citizenship and leadership. In farming, just like anything else, there are disappointments. A fellow has to learn how to give and take in anything he tries. Here in the F.F.A. there are a lot of awards offered, with thousands of boys all trying to win them. We don’t always get what we’re aiming for, but we learn how to win and lose in the right way. By inspiring the boy, like the F.F.A. does, it helps him to take better care of what God has given the American people.”

Through its teachings, its competitions and its organizational orders of ascendancy, the F.F.A. gave Joe Moore—as it has given thousands of other farm youths—a feeling of worthwhileness and prestige in his school, his community, and even in such cities as Nashville, Knoxville, Kansas City and Chicago. To impart this sense of high standing, thereby breaking down the classic inferiority complex of the farmer in a city-dominated culture, is a key mission of such organizations as the 4-H and the Future Farmers.

Under this influence, Joe took the big step that was to commit him finally to farming. Beginning to make good money from his Durocs, he decided he could do even better with a modern, sanitary farrowing barn. When his father resisted the idea, Joe and Donald came to a resentful impasse before Thelma intervened with a compromise. Donald ended up contributing $400 toward the new hog barn, with Joe paying another $600.

The farrowing barn was Joe’s first investment in a permanent improvement, and it marked the day when, by spending his hard-earned money on capital equipment he could not sell at the market, he began to tie himself to the farm. His decision to drop music was painful, but Joe Moore says firmly, “I don’t like to do anything half.” So into the scrap heap went his ideas of singing professionally, into the attic went the tenor saxophone his mother had given him, and into the business of farming went Joe Moore.

From the best Angus breeder in his area he bought “Big Boy,” the finest animal Joe has ever owned. To fatten Big Boy for showing, Joe fed him three times a day; he washed him every Saturday, groomed his hide with oil and got grandmother Carver to put a good square plait in his tail. Result: at the 1949 International Livestock Exposition in Chicago, Big Boy won 16th place among the nation’s best Angus, and Joe, kissing Big Boy’s poll, got his picture in the Chicago Tribune.

Bad Luck. Still dissatisfied with the quality of his cattle, Joe worked doggedly to improve his herd. A few months later, Joe and Donald Moore drove over to Winchester, Ky. to look around for more cattle. There Joe spotted a pair of beautiful Angus heifers, “the prettiest things you ever saw.” But their owner wanted $500 apiece, and father Donald argued that the price was too high for Joe. Joe reluctantly agreed, spent the rest of the day looking at other cattle. That night Joe took his disappointment back to the hotel. Still discussing the two heifers he had liked, Joe asked his father hopefully: “You reckon it’s the thing?” Donald relented. “I reckon if a man wants a thing bad enough,” said he, “it’s the thing.” Joe bought the heifers.

Both heifers had been bred about two months before, but one apparently lost her calf. Later, the other produced a well-formed calf, but it smothered before Joe found it.

“I think the Lord was testing me,” says Joe. In any event, his luck soon turned. An Angus cow produced twin heifers and, the next year, one of the Kentucky heifers delivered “as good a bull calf as you ever saw.” Thus, mainly from those early purchases, Joe has built up a strong herd of purebred Angus: 26 cows, including six newly bred heifers, two bulls and two nursing calves. Value: about $8,000.

Spiritual Crisis. Until his senior year in high school, Joe paid little attention to girls. When his mother, worried about his lack of social life, urged him to date some of the local belles, Joe would reply: “Oh, I don’t want to go out with those old girls and spend all that money.” Finally, however, he began dating Ann Huffines. On their first date, says Joe, they “talked about the weather, and I liked the way she talked. I’ve always knowed there was other girls prettier somewhat than she is, but I found out beauty is only skin deep. I know she’ll work with me on the farm—some girls wouldn’t—and she might even go out and milk a cow.” Will Ann help out with the farm correspondence and book work? Says Joe: “Yes, I figger she’ll handle all of it except things about money.” In Kansas City last week, Joe and Ann walked hand in hand as they shopped for a diamond ring.

Last year Ann added to a spiritual crisis in Joe’s life. Like most Jackson Countians, the adults in Joe’s family have belonged to the Church of Christ* since Civil War days. Now it was time for Joe to make his decision about entering the church, and it was a decision he faced with dreadful seriousness. Ann, a devout church member, had no intention of marrying an unconverted man. She talked with him for hours about the Bible, pleaded with him to accept the faith. Joe lashed around in his Bible late into the nights, reading time and again Proverbs 27:12: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished.” After a year of inner turmoil, Joe slipped away one weekday and drove to the home of a Church of Christ minister in Carthage. “Preacher,” said he, “I want you to baptize me.” The ceremony was quickly performed.

Returning to his farm from his Kansas City triumph this week, Joe planned to apply to his debts the $1,000 that went with his Star Farmer award. His immediate future is made uncertain by his I-A draft status. But no matter where he is sent or for how long, he will return to the life that, through his troubles as well as his triumphs, he has come to consider the best and the fullest in the world. Says Farmer Joe Moore: “Farming’s the closest thing to the Lord you can do. You work with the things the Lord has made and put. The rains don’t come and this dies or that dies and you don’t make with this and you do make with that. It’s just you and Him.”

*Members of the Church of Christ are also known as Campbellites, after Thomas Campbell and his son Alexander. In 1809, in Washington, Pa., they rejected Calvinism, formed an association for “the Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things.” The Campbellites believe that laymen have the right and duty to preach. Their motto: “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” About 80% of Church of Christ membership (1,500,000) is in rural areas.

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