The independent farmer, says one of their number, is doomed to lose his fight against bureaucracy; but it was worth making and will not be forgotten
After winter’s long, cold enemy occupation, spring is back; no longer halting and promissory, but true, irreversible spring. Now the springheads, dried up in last summer’s fierce drought and long silent, burst out again, refilled by this spring’s plentiful moisture, and rush on their way to the sea with a chance of drowning babble in babble as they pour past Washington (we are in the Potomac watershed). Now the voices of the fertilizer and lime purveyor and the farm implement hucksters are heard louder than the voice of the turtle in the land. “Make five blades of corn grow where one grew before,” they coo. “Let 140 bushels an acre (with fertilizers) swell farm surpluses which 40 bushels (without fertilizer) could never swell so prosperously. Let one man do (with machines) the work that three could scarcely do (without). So disemployment thrives.” Of course, they do not really say these things; this is only the logic of what they say.
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