The New American Farmer

(8 of 11)
as it sometimes is for Pat. She goes along on most of Pat's frequent trips to meetings of farm organizations in big cities, but she is most at home in her kitchen, where she is a master of the Pillsbury Bake-Off school of roast-beef-and-apple-pie cuisine.

Socially, the Benedicts are an example of the conservative values associated with farmers; their life-style would seem spartan to a city family with their assets. Fran delights in giving small dinner parties for neighbors—at which Pat may down a Scotch or two, though his regular drink is beer. But many evenings and weekends are devoted to TV or simply family conversation. The Benedicts are Roman Catholics and regular churchgoers; when St. Cecilia's Church in Sabin burned to the ground two years ago, Pat was elected to help supervise construction of a new building. He is close with his money but has unwound enough in the past few years to buy a Cadillac, several color TV sets and motorcycles for each of his three oldest sons. This year he even treated himself to a two-week trip hunting elk, bear and bighorn sheep in the Canadian Yukon. Pat sounds apologetic about his worldly goods and pleasures: 'Since the kids have gotten older we've bought a lot of things we really didn't need —but that is one of the reasons we've been working hard."

The children all seem to enjoy farming, but Pat insists that they not make up their minds about careers until they finish college. Says Pat: "I've seen some families come to blows because a son was forced to farm when he didn't want to." But last year, when he bought still another neighbor's farm, Pat for the first time left the house standing because "it would be perfect for one of the kids."

If the kids should choose to leave the farm, where is the next generation of Pat Benedicts to come from? That is perhaps the most important question in American agriculture. High interest rates, soaring prices for land, machinery, fertilizer and pesticides, and the very fact that farmers must operate on a large scale to be fairly confident of regular profit, make it difficult for operators of small- and medium-sized farms to expand and even tougher for young farmers to get started.

Says John Strickland, a veteran of 25 years of farming and service as a county agricultural agent in Georgia: "Four or five hundred acres is about the minimum farm from which a decent living can be made. Buying that much land would cost between $400,000 and half a million. No young man, no matter how much initiative and savvy he has and no matter how hard he is willing to work, is likely to be able to raise the capital needed."

Iowa's David Garst, one of the biggest U.S. farmer-businessmen (see box), argues that a young farmer can still get started if he is willing to rent land at first, buy used instead of. new machinery, and take a part-time job off the farm to supplement his income in the early years. But that requires a devotion to back-breaking labor and to the rural life that even many youths raised on farms no longer display.

California Wheat and Barley Grower Ken Lederer, 44, waxes lyrical about the spiritual rewards of farming: "When you see all your work out there on the ground, dependent on so many things you can't control, like the frost, the bugs and the rain, you begin to appreciate how small