160 HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 



never has paid. Oh, of course, you may pick 

 out individual farmers who have fared pretty 

 well at it under exceptional conditions, and you 

 may find records of exceptional years when 

 whole neighborhoods of grain farmers have 

 had a taste of prosperity. But I'm talking 

 about average returns the country over, taking 

 one year with another. For the average 

 farmer, under average conditions, to persist in 

 the business of producing and selling from his 

 farm the grains and the common staples of the 

 soil is to sink steadily into poverty until pov- 

 erty engulfs him. If the farmers of a com- 

 munity unite in that practice, the community 

 is impoverished and by and by abandoned for 

 virgin fields. 



That's perfectly good history, and there's 

 perfectly good logic in it. Let's not bother too 

 much with the statistics. Since I've been farm- 

 ing, just for my own satisfaction I've dug out 

 and analyzed the figures covering the produc- 

 tion of the staple crops in all the states since 

 the beginning of official records. Barring some 

 occasional fluctuations which are unimportant 

 in proportion to the whole mass, the story of 

 all these crops shows pretty much of a same- 



