MORE FOOD FOR LESS WORK

Life Magazine 5jan53

[More on Green Revolution]

In 75 years U.S. has fought and won an agricultural revolution.

In what was once the almost worthless swampland of Florida monstrous machines now move ponderously across broad green acres, harvesting a $4 million celery crop at a time of year when most of the rest of the U.S. is wintered in. And diagonally across the country the sagebrush deserts of Washington have been transformed by canals and sprinkler systems into fertile farmland. These new acres, ripped out of wasteland and made to bear rich harvests, are only a part of the enormous change that has come over American farming in the past few decades - a change so far-reaching that it amounts to an agricultural revolution. The revolution has brought with it new machines, new crops, new methods, and today U.S. farmers - even though they grow fewer in number every year - do a better and better job of feeding the country's growing population.

This triumph began in the last century when the Department of Agriculture and the various states began searching for ways to improve both production and quality of food. Later, as good land grew scarce, private industry joined in the search. The result has been more farming progress in the last 75 years than all the world's farmers were able to achieve in the previous 75 centuries. The federal government has spent one billion dollars since 1900 to finance this search, but the investment has been profitable. Each year a single development, hybrid corn, brings farmers enough extra income to pay for the entire federal research program for the last 52 years.

The revolution's many facets - machinery, new livestock, fertilizers, crop rotation, insecticides, irrigation - have begun to pay off only in the last decade when laboratory achievements reached the average farm. Nowhere is the pay-off more evident than in the South, once a two-crop land worn out by cotton and tobacco but now a flourishing food belt for poultry, cattle, fruits and vegetables. Southern farmland has tripled in value since the late '30s, and the value of the South's food production has more than tripled in the past 10 years. In a similar way, through the improvements shown on these pages, the nation's food production has become a modernized, mechanized business that is still making advances that will supply America's growing multitudes with still more food for still less work.