AGRICULTURE: The Pushbutton Cornucopia

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At 5:30 one frosty Indiana morning last week. Farmer Warren North, 45, rolled out of bed to get at his chores. After a hearty breakfast (orange juice, cereal, bacon and eggs), he left his twelve-room white frame and fieldstone house, walked briskly to the barnyard. In the early morning mist the low-lying white barn, surmounted by five giant blue-black silos, rode the frozen prairie like an ocean liner. Like a rumble of surf came the hungry bellowing of 400 white-faced Herefords and the grunting of 500 Hampshire hogs, waiting at row on row of troughs to be fed. In the barn. North stepped up to an instrument panel as intricate as a ship's, began pushing buttons and pulling switches. All around, the barn came to vibrant life. From one silo dropped ground corn, from another silage, from a third shelled corn.

By pushing other buttons. Farmer North shot in supplementary vitamins, mineral and hormone nutrients. Then he cut in the big noisemaker. In a channel in front of the silos a snakelike auger began to turn. As it writhed, it propelled the feed up a steep incline and sent it tumbling out through a conduit that passed directly over 330 feet of feed troughs. At regular intervals, trap doors automatically distributed the individual animal's feed. When all the animals on one side of a trough had been fed, the traps changed position, shunted feed to the animals waiting on the other side.

Ten minutes later, Farmer North was through with a job that would have taken five men half a day working with buckets and pitchforks. He was ready to indulge his hobby. He returned to his farmhouse and poured himself another cup of coffee. While it cooled, he read a story on the "farm problem" in the Wall Street Journal. Carrying his cup and a cigarette, he walked into his living room, 40 feet long and beige-carpeted wall to wall. It was dominated at the far end by a two-story pipe organ flanked by two electronic organs and a grand piano. Farmer North sat down at the console, and after running through a few warm-up chords and arpeggios, began to play Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.

Symbol & Example. Farmer North is a symbol—and a prime example—of the profound changes that have been wrought in U.S. agriculture by mechanization and automation, plus the new use of fertilizers. In the last 20 years, farming has changed more radically than in the previous two centuries. Once farmers used to dole out fertilizer thinking only of how much it cost them. Now they pour it on by the carload, confident of getting back bigger profits at harvest time. Farm use of fertilizer has risen in 20 years from 1,500,000 tons to 6,200,000 tons. To handle the huge increase in crops, farmers have had to mechanize almost every farm job. From 1938 to 1958, farmers more than trebled their ownership of tractors, to 4,700,000 (an average1½ per commercial farm). Since 1945, they have increased their number of newer work-saving machinery by 1,200%—mostly with machines that had not even been invented in 1938. Farmers have invested $17.5 billion in 1,040,000 combines, 745,000 cornpickers, 590,000 pickup hay balers, 255,000 field forage harvesters and other machinery. They spend $1.5 billion for gasoline and oil each year just to keep the equipment going.