AGRICULTURE: The Pushbutton Cornucopia

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By 1957 Warren North had all the land he wanted. The question was how he could best use it. He was selling grain and feeding hogs and some cattle. He decided that raising grain did not pay enough and that he had to go in for mass production of livestock, use all his grain for his own animals. Through the years North had kept a tight rein on his wage outlay. He employed only two year-round hired hands, plus two part-time men in summer. But the going wage in his area had gone up from $100 to $180 a month, plus a house, utilities, etc. "I figured even if I could get more men they would not be any account."

The Drive to Automate. For the same reason that inspired many an industrialist faced with similar cost-price squeeze, North decided to automate his livestock feeding, bought glass-lined steel Harvestore silos, developed by the A. O. Smith Corp. of Milwaukee, Wis., for $55,000. Hermetically sealed to prevent decay, the silos permitted him to store corn and silage as soon as cut, thereby giving it all the feed value of green produce. Since the corn did not have to be dried to bone hardness as in ordinary storage, it would also be easily digestible. (Around Warren North, in a more primitive cycle, many farmers still followed the traditional and inefficient practice of feeding dried corn to cattle, running in hogs to pick out undigested kernels from the manure, then letting chickens clean up.)

North spent another $75,000 on equipment to go with the silos. The result is that he can swiftly raise his livestock feeding output without more capital. By turning his animals over three times a year, he is already running at the rate of 1,200 head of cattle, 1,500 hogs a year. Depending on the market outlook, he can increase this to 1,800 cattle and 4,000 hogs with no additional labor.

Last year Prairie Farmer, the leading midwestern farm magazine (circ. 415,000), was so impressed by North that it held its annual farm progress show on his farm. Two hundred tents were set up. In two days 215,000 visitors tramped over the place to see how he does it. Said Jim Thomson, managing editor of Prairie Farmer: "North is one of America's great farmers." Actually, what Warren North has done is also being done by many another:

RUSSELL CASE, 36, who 20 years ago helped his father and grandfather operate a scrubby 100-acre place, now has two farms totaling 2,500 acres near West Mansfield, Ohio. It takes eight mobile radios to keep the two dozen trucks, 19 tractors, six combines and assorted other mechanical gear shuttling back and forth to harvest crops worth $150,000.

C. E. BENZEL cultivates an 180-acre irrigated farm outside Alliance, Neb. which last year produced 625 tons of beet sugar. Using the latest in mechanical planters, thinners and harvesters, Benzel and six helpers do the work of 30 migratory workers.