Down On The Farm : An Agricultural Revolution

Photography sees with the eye of a camera. It makes records of places, people, and [music] events. Photography lets you see the world about you without ever leaving your classroom. It's your window on the world. Photography shows shows how and why things happen. [music] And now through photography, Kodak brings you this edition of Scream News Digest. >> [music] >> The American farmer. This is his story. From the wooden plow to the mighty harvest, an agricultural revolution down on the farm. From colonial times to the dawn of the 20th century, the farmer was the backbone of the American economy. He symbolized the sturdy pioneer who fed the nation's body and nourished its spirit with his courage, fierce independence, and self-reliance. Down on the farm in the early 1900s, families worked from before sun up to after sundown 7 days a week. Mothers cooked on wood burning stoves by the light of kerosene lamps, just as their own mothers and grandmothers and great-g grandandmothers had done before them. [music] The hours were long and the life was hard. And still more than three out of every five Americans lived on farms as the United States entered the 20th century. [music] But change was coming. A revolution was taking place. Industry and immigration were remaking the face of America. [music] A new concept in industrial production, the assembly line, [music] was increasing output and raising wages. The United States economy was booming, and the growth of cities and urban areas was luring more and more young people away from the farm. [music] The balance of population was swinging from the rural to the urban areas. [music] Charles Lindberg, the lone eagle, flew the Atlantic as Americans, in cities and on farms soared through the roaring 20s, sharing a prosperity that it seemed would never end. But end it did, and the United States was thrust into the Great Depression. Bread lines formed from coast to coast and men [music] sold apples on street corners. Despair was everywhere. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president as the crisis deepened. Sharecroers and migrant farm workers lined the highways of many a Midwestern state, out of work with no place to go. As farm prices dropped and dropped and dropped, huddled together in makeshift shelters, life was a day-to-day existence. [music] After a lifetime of labor, there was no security, no future, no hope. One man spoke for the young in the caravan. >> My wife and I is forced out on the farm because we hadn't get no day labor to do. We're only getting six bits in the dollar a day and we can't make an honest decent living at it. And that's the reason we're out here on Highway 61 right today. And we want to get a place to live and work and make an honest decent living. That's what I'm married to woman to take care of her and make her honest, decent living. That's what we're going to do if there's any change at all. [music] >> Already mortgaged and deeply in debt, the American farmer could not meet his payments. When corn brought 3 cents a bushel, and the people in the cities didn't even have three cents to buy it. Farm failures, foreclosures, evictions became commonplace. At the height of the depression, more than a thousand families a day were forced to give up their farms. [music] Taking what little they could carry with them, the evicted families drove off in search of some distant better life. For many, it would be a neverending journey. This was a bleak and bitter time for an industry that had been considered the lifeblood of a nation. And the worst was yet to come. Drought and dust storms swept across [music] the bread basket of America in the middle 1930s, turning millions of acres of fertile farmland into eroded, ravaged wastelands. >> [music] >> Never in a hundred years had the forces of man and nature combined to punish a people whose survival depended on what they could draw from the soil. [music] >> [music] >> Cattle roamed the dried up range, pawing the dirt, looking for water holes that had long since disappeared. Much of the Middle West looked like an American Sahara as a drought continued. The soil eroded and the longsuffering farmer waited and hoped, hoped and waited. The loss in crops and cattle ran into the tens of millions of dollars. Animals that survived were little more than skin and bones. I've been farming 50 years and this is the worst I've ever seen. You know, the land that I got out of thought the government paid me not to plant. We're mighty bad oak, but I guess there's a lot of them worse off than we are. >> This for the American farmer was the darkest hour before the dawn. government and industry would come to the aid of the hardpressed families down on the farm. Giant irrigation and reclamation projects were begun to harness rivers and produce power. The waters at once destroyed and eroded would now become the servant of man. The results of the dams and power plants were dramatic and farreaching, stretching out for thousands of square miles to enrich the lives of millions of farm families. In many rural areas in the early 1930s, only two out of every 100 farms had electricity. Now it was at the fingertips of 10 and 20 and 30 times that number. Kerosene lamps were stored away. Power had come down on the farm to change and improve, serve and entertain old and young as they did their chores and lived their lives. The 30s made way for the 40s. The Great Depression was ending. Europe was at war. And the American farmer was once again producing at peak capacity to meet the agricultural demands of domestic and foreign markets. [music] December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor is attacked and America goes to war. 12 million men are called to the colors and a third of them come from down on the farm. Never before has the United States needed so much from its farms. And never before have the farms been so under demand. The shortage becomes so acute that servicemen in America are sent to farms during harvest time to bring in crops that might otherwise rot in the ground. >> [music] >> And the demands of a wartime economy stimulate new ways to increase agricultural output. Now virtually all that a farmer grows finds a ready market. The American GI wherever he goes is the best fed fighting man in the world. The road to peace is long and hard, but finally the victory is won. The infamy of Pearl Harbor is avenged when the Japanese surrender to General MacArthur in 1945. The big parade begins. GI coming home to signal the [music] start of the greatest decade of growth in American history. Agriculture will play an important part in the exploding economy as machines grow bigger and more productive. By 1950, farming has advanced faster and farther in the United States in half a century than in any other country in the entire previous history of the world. And one man-hour of farm labor yields more than five times as much food as it did in 1920. The technological and scientific revolution extends into and throughout all phases of American farm life. [music] Chemical breakthroughs and biological discoveries multiply production and improve quality. Additives and supplements enable chickens under controlled conditions to lay as many as seven eggs a day. [music] Farm assets total almost $250 billion, 2/3 of the value of all corporation assets in America. [music] The flood tide of agricultural plenty is enough by 1960 to feed and clothe half the world. The young, the new generation of farmers is also caught up in the challenges and opportunities provided by America's agricultural revolution. The 4H clubs, the future farmers of America, attract millions of boys and girls who learn by doing. [music] This is a new kind of pioneer who one day may be operating and managing farms where computers [music] plot every facet of agricultural life. [music] Already automation has come to many an owner down on the farm. Morren North of Brookston, Indiana is one. [music] He is in a sense a push button farmer. By using a complex system of buttons and switches, he can feed his cattle automatically. [music] Spinning augars push the fodder from the storage silos to the cattle troughs. Farmer North can, if he wants, blend several kinds of feed with the push of a button. [music] And supplementary vitamins and hormones can also be dropped into the augur before it begins the final leg of its automated journey to the waiting cattle. [music] >> [music] >> In 10 minutes, push button farming has done a job that once would have kept five men working for half a day. But increasing production is not without its problems. There is a widening gap between the price a farmer gets for his crops and their cost at the supermarket. And despite government efforts at crop control, agricultural overp production averages between 5 and 10% each year. And yet even this overp production may someday be a virtue if the population explosion continues. A Swedish economist Gunnar Murdo has predicted that before the end of the 1970s, the world will need every shred of food and fiber that the United States can grow. The challenge until then is to find new and constructive ways to utilize America's mighty harvest and to make the nation's agricultural abundance not a curse but a blessing. [music]