The New American Farmer

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that force the cells to divide and differentiate; each cell develops into a strawberry plant. Farmers can thus bypass the seed and can plant well-developed shoots that grow fast and are free from viruses that attack plants germinating naturally.

Because of the technological revolution, one farmer in the U.S. now feeds 59 people. Elsewhere, the ratio of total population to the number of farmers and farm laborers is 19.2 in Western Europe, 13.7 in Japan, a mere 10 in the Soviet Union. U.S. agriculture feeds people well and cheaply too. The average American intake of more than 3,000 calories per day is among the highest in the world, and though citizens of some other nations match the U.S. in calories, probably none do in variety of diet.

To be sure, epicures complain rightly that the bland taste of American fruits and vegetables cannot compare with the flavor of much produce delivered to European tables. In the U.S., food must be refrigerated, preserved and shipped across continental distances, and the varieties suitable to mechanical planting and harvesting often are not as tasty as those cultivated lovingly by hand (some people cannot discover any taste at all in cloned strawberries). But agricultural mass production has a benefit more important to most people: it keeps costs down. High as retail food prices have gone, food accounts for only 23% of all private spending by Americans; only Canadians come very close. By contrast, food consumes 25.8% of all private spending in France, 27% in West Germany, 33.1% in Japan, 42% in Brazil, 52% in the U.S.S.R.

Enough food is left over to make the export capacity of American agriculture the hope of the have-not world. Farm-product exports tripled in the past six years to almost $27 billion, helping mightily to offset the cost of imports. The U.S. exports more wheat, corn and other coarse grains (barley, oats, sorghum) than all the rest of the world combined. Pat Benedict and farmers like him are America's best hope to counter the trade challenge presented by the oilmen of Araby and the energetic manufacturers of Japan. U.S. food exports would be higher still were it not for a variety of barriers: outrageous quotas that keep Japanese consumers from buying as much U.S. beef and fruit as they would like, variable tariffs that hold the prices of American foodstuffs in the European Community above those of locally grown items, and the inability of the hungry underdeveloped nations to scrape up enough cash to buy more U.S. meat and grain.

At home, the necessity for the successful farmer to become a financier-salesman-engineer-scientist has accelerated a rural social revolution. Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz vigorously preached the virtues of large-scale efficient farming, a message often translated in the croplands into five blunt words: Get big or get out. The decline in U.S. farm population that has been under way at least since 1910 has speeded up in recent years. By April 1977, only 1 of every 28 Americans lived on a farm, vs. 1 in 21 in 1970 and 1 in 3 early in the century. The number of people living on U.S. farms, fewer than 10 million, is lower now than in 1830.

Some 70% of the 2.7 million farms left in the U.S. (down from 4 million in 1960) gross $20,000 or less each year, and the people who work them should not be classed as farmers at all. Some have failed to make a living growing crops