The New American Farmer

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and now commute to town to work as factory hands or clerks; others are mainly fertilizer salesmen, rural storekeepers or the like who raise, say, a few hogs as a sideline. "Farmers" in the $20,000-and-under class get 80% of their income from off-the-land jobs.

The 30% of U.S. farms classified as medium-sized or large take in no less than 90% of all cash receipts from agriculture. At the top of the scale, farms grossing $100,000 a year or more are increasing —to 162,000 last year, from 23,000 in 1960 —partly by swallowing up the lands of less successful farmers who sold out. Though these very large operations still constitute only 6% of all farms, they take in 53% of all farm cash receipts, almost double then-share as recently as 1967. These big farms are on the cutting edge of the marketing and technological revolution, as exemplified by the operations of Benedict Farms Inc. and its president and sole stockholder, Patrick E. Benedict.

Six foot two and ruggedly handsome, Benedict is an odd mixture of shyness and aggressiveness. He speaks slowly and softly, choosing each word with care, and has to' be coaxed into talking about himself. But in discussing his business, he displays the combative urge that made him a championship wrestler in high school and during his two-year Navy hitch. Says Pat: "It's a sport I identify with. You're out there on your own, and if you can't cut it, it's pretty obvious." He feels much the same about farming, castigating many of his fellows for being too timid about expanding and adopting new technology. As he told TIME Correspondent Roberto Sur: "I think it's because they're alone a lot out in the fields and they have too much time to think. They end up convincing themselves that if they just hold on for a year longer things will get better and there will be no need to make troublesome changes. But the economics are such that I think if you're standing still you're really falling behind. You've got to grow to stay alive."

Pat has been expanding ever since he joined his father Edwin, now 67 and retired, as a full-time farmer in 1951 after two years at Moorhead (Minn.) State University. The Benedict family, originally from France (the first known ancestor came to colonial America after a stopover in England in the early 1700s), has been farming since Pat's great-grandfather moved to Minnesota from Wisconsin shortly after the Civil War. During the Depression the homestead shrank from 1,000 acres to 400 and father Edwin had to hunt partridges to help feed the family. But post-World War II prosperity enabled Edwin to buy another 300 acres when Pat began farming with him.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Pat and Edwin kept reinvesting their profits and borrowing to acquire more land. Today the family owns 1,900 acres and rents another 1,600—underscoring a surprising point about modern U.S. farm economics. Tenant farmers these days are no longer the classic Southern sharecroppers, who have almost disappeared, but are often expanding agriculturists like Benedict who own land too. As it grew, Pat's farm absorbed four others; in three cases, he razed and burned the houses, uprooted graceful shade trees and returned all the land to crops. Says he: "Those farms had lived out their usefulness, and I guess I've brought them back to