334 Singing Valleys 



It is not obstinacy which makes the farmer continue to 

 raise crops on which he is losing money. Nor is it ignorance 

 of economics, or stupidity. Though city dwellers are all too 

 prone to accuse him of all these sins. It is because he is caught 

 in a system. Any new experiment he makes requires several 

 years to prove itself; and with climate a continual variant, no 

 new venture can be proved with a single trial. Any mistake or 

 rash judgment involves several years of loss. 



It is this which makes the man on the land a conservative. 

 He might be more of a gambler, and readier to make changes 

 with apparently changing conditions were he the sole com- 

 mander of his fields. But he is not. Besides the ebb and flow 

 of economic tides which wash the shores of industry and 

 business, the farmer has to take into account wind, rains, bliz- 

 zards, floods, droughts, frosts, heat, cyclones, dust storms, 

 grasshoppers, gypsy moths, chinch bugs, corn-borers, blight, 

 rot and smut. All and any one of these may enter into his 

 bookkeeping every year. No matter how he tends his fences 

 he cannot insure his fields against them. All these deliver the 

 farmer from any possible egotism. He knows that success or 

 failure does not rest with him alone. On the farm, God is 

 always the silent partner. The articulate half of the partnership 

 may expostulate or rebel, but the covenant still binds. It is 

 irrevocable. 



There was a man who planted thirty acres of corn. A week 

 after the hills sprouted, the heavens opened and the rains 

 washed new corn and top-soil into the creek. The next spring 

 the man plowed and planted that thirty acres to corn again. 

 The young crop throve through May and June. Then came 

 the heat, and six weeks of drought. The corn burned in the 

 ground before it could tassel. 



That winter the man and his wife were on the town. When 

 another April came, the farmer got out the plow and started a 

 first furrow across the thirty-acre field. His wife came out to 

 the fence rail. 



