For the Small Farm

ROOTS IN THE EARTH--P. Alston Waring and Walter Magnes Teller--Harper ($2.50).

This small (202-page) book is big news because it combats a hard-plugged notion that U.S. farms are going to be huge land factories, and makes an intelligent case for the survival of the small farm.

No City Fellers. Waring & Teller live in Pennsylvania's Bucks County, the Shangri-la of many an earth-hungry Manhattanite. But even though they can write workmanlike sentences that drive home their points with almost professional literary competence, Waring & Teller are no part of the literary back-to-the-land movement. There is none of the part-time or weekend farmer wistfulness about them.

They belong by family and tradition in the rolling Delaware Valley country, and as poultrymen, dairymen, sheepmen and general farmers they are pursuing the only profession they know.

The family-size farmer, in the eyes of such writers as Carey McWilliams and John Steinbeck, has been doomed by the development of power machinery, the application of the basic principles of the industrial revolution to crop-growing and animal husbandry. Waring & Teller think this analysis is pure hogwash -- the sort of thing that city fellers like Steinbeck and McWilliams would naturally fall for. But, they insist, to stay on the land and make a living from it, the small farmer must be come a highly proficient scientist as well as something of an artist. He must master the tricks of contour plowing and strip cropping. He must eschew the temptation to bet everything on a single cash crop, for that way, in years of overproduction, lies bankruptcy.

Waring, with 2,000 laying hens, is on the fringe of commercial chicken farming, and Teller raises Cheviot sheep to be sold for breeding purposes. But they raise most of their own foodstuffs, most of their animal feeds, and they stuff themselves and their families with eggs, chicken, mutton and milk.

No Socialists. Farm purchasing cooperatives are becoming the order of the day in certain parts of the country, and Waring & Teller buy their open-formula feeds, and their fertilizers, seeds, paint and disinfectants, through a purchasing cooperative. This sort of cooperation, however, is not enough to close the economic circuit. It is quite as important to get the advantage of pooled bargaining power in marketing as it is in buying. Waring & Teller belong to marketing cooperatives, and so get the cash benefits that accrue to the large-scale trader.

They do not regard membership in cooperatives as synonymous with "collectivism" or "socialism." To them, it is the voluntary "integration" of the individual with the community, something that might be called "nonisolated individualism" as contrasted with "rugged individualism." Waring & Teller believe in reading books, and they swear particularly by the prewar yearbooks of the Department of Agriculture, which were authored largely by the remarkably clear and persuasive Gove Hambidge. Book learning has enabled Waring & Teller to push family agriculture into many profitable bypaths.

Beekeeping is a low-cost cinch, for a hive of bees requires only eight hours of care annually, as compared with an hour and a half daily for the family cow. And two or three mature doe rabbits will keep rabbit meat flowing to the table with almost beltline regularity.

Waring & Teller say they could go on to tell about ducks, geese, guinea fowl, calves and kids and steers, maple sugar, vinegar and wine and the value of conserving game on the farm, but they trust that in a few paragraphs their readers will get the idea about diversification. As for orchards, they doubt the value of putting much time and money into them. They have never been able to eat enough peaches or apples to recover the cost of spraying for home use.

Roots in the Earth in a basic American document. It is a well-argued, practical book that in no invidious sense smells of the barnyard.

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