278 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



the Tennessee Valley. Can, or should the federal government 

 try to speed up this development? That is something the voters 

 of the next twenty years will have to make up their minds 

 about. 



A PLAN FOR PLANNERS 



To stop the erosion of the soil, the Soil Conservation Service 

 was created. To bolster up the farm crop market, the Agricul' 

 tural Adjustment Administration was created. To help farmers 

 to produce more with greater efficiency, the Agricultural Ex 

 tension Service was created. To each new problem of use of the 

 land, government countered by creating some agency whose 

 job it was to try to find a solution. 



A sick man with a specialist for each of his many ail' 

 ments doesn't have much chance to survive if one specialist 

 doesn't know what the other is doing. The same thing is true 

 about agriculture. If the land grant colleges try to increase 

 the farmer's crops while the Agricultural Adjustment Ad' 

 ministration tries to make him grow less crops and the Soil 

 Conservation Service tries to make him grow different crops, 

 agriculture would just collapse in a tangle. The fact that spe' 

 cialists have been called in is a sign that agriculture has reached 

 a point at which some sort of control is necessary. With this 

 control some sort of central organization had to be created, 

 so that the various efforts to aid agriculture would not end in a 

 stalemate. In 1938, the entire Department of Agriculture was 

 reorganized. The Office of Land'Use Coordination was given 

 the job of keeping all of the various bureaus and agencies work' 

 ing together smoothly. The Bureau of Agricultural Economics 

 became the source of the plans for the other divisions to follow 

 out. In this way the Department of Agriculture adjusted its 

 organization so that it could work and plan as a unit. 



The Department of Agriculture has made ten major attacks 

 on the farm problem. Here they are. 



