A Time for Planting in Illinois

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"Burn down your cities and leave our farms," William Jennings Bryan once said, "and your cities will spring up again as if by magic, but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." Amid tales of urban blight, the U.S. may find solace in the enduring, seemingly endless reach of its fecund farmland. The nation is still sustained by the richest bounty of produce on earth, and it is sowing time again. TIME Correspondent Frank Merrick last week visited Erv Walters' farm in northern Illinois. His report:

ERV WALTERS is an archetypal American farmer: rugged, sinewy, industrious and forthright. He has spent nearly every one of his 51 springs working the rich Midwest land. In 1941 he and his wife Lucille came to Illinois from their native Wisconsin with, as he proudly recalls, "nothing more than the clothes on our backs and $500 in cash." They have been remarkably successful. Together with his sons Dick, 28, and Dan, 24, Walters now owns 765 acres of prime farmland around the towns of Hebron and Woodstock; today the land is valued at more than $1,000 an acre. Three homes, three barns, five machinery sheds, three feed lots and a dozen silos stand about the spread. Throw in a rumbling squadron of assorted machinery —tractors, trucks, combines and related equipment—plus the cattle and hogs Erv and his sons are fattening for market, plus the $100,000 worth of planting costs. Add it all up and the Walters appear to be worth about $1 million. Erv Walters wryly notes, "I and the bank own quite a lot."

Like so many successful American farmers, Erv is actually cash poor. "The city people think we get real rich," he says, "but I've worked many a year and not earned a nickel." He gave up dairy farming years ago because that requires extra hands, and hands cost goodly sums of hard cash. "When you're a farmer," his son Dick points out, "you never have any money in your pocket until you retire and sell out, because it's all invested. We get paid every few months, while a hired man would have to be paid every week and earn as much as he would in industry." Erv readily admits that sons are as important as they ever were in working the land. Without sons who can be persuaded to stay down on the farm, a farmer simply goes out of business when he gets too old to handle the chores himself—as is happening to two of Erv's neighbors. Also, inflation does not stop at the city limits. The Walters receive the same price for their crops that they did in 1953 (though livestock prices are now higher), but a tractor that cost $2,300 then now costs $10,000.