Books: Collective Farming in Ohio

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PLEASANT VALLEY—Louis Bromfield—Harpers ($3).

After nearly 15 years' absence from the U.S., mostly in France, Novelist Louis Bromfield returned in 1938 to his native Ohio valley near Mansfield, bought three rundown farms, built a big house, and organized a cooperative farming community. Pleasant Valley is his story of the venture. Its 301 readable pages are crammed with anecdotes and opinions, experiences in house building and land reclamation, bits of autobiography and local history, and a few modest essays, modeled on Thoreau, on wild life, farm life, and the healing power of the land.

If Author Bromfield's resources and tastes are exceptional, his farm problem was common as dirt. In fact, it was dirt. The three farms he bought were typical of millions of acres of once-rich U.S. land. They had been farmed recklessly, then rented to tenant farmers who put nothing, back into the land, and finally, as the top soil washed away, abandoned. Bromfield's grandfather had raised eight children on a 100-acre valley farm, and bought little more than spices, tea, salt and coffee. Bromfield's 640 acres, when he bought them, would not support a single family.

Adopting tested reclamation measures, Bromfield put five families besides his own on his land. His model was the Russian collective farm, with himself as capitalist substituting for the state. To each family he supplied all food except "coffee, spices and sugar," and a salary "above the average." He agreed to put up whatever money was needed until the farms showed a profit. Then he was to receive the first 5%, with all profits above that divided according to each tenant's salary.

Socially, artistically and humanly, he reports that his experiment has been a success. The landscape became beautiful. In three years eight inches of topsoil was added-to exhausted fields. One of the tenants stole, and, when the sheriff ordered him away, broke all the windows in his house. Another started quarrels among the farmers. But for the most part life went pleasantly and rewardingly. Whether anyone but a prosperous novelist could afford such an experiment, Author Bromfield does not say.