34 2 Singing Valleys 



over to the grazing of cattle were furrowed to make wheat 

 fields and cornfields. 



The story of the war boom and its effect on American corn- 

 growers has been told in another chapter. Its interest for us 

 here lies in what it reveals of the farmers' changed attitude 

 toward scientific farming. The men who had left the farms 

 for the towns and for jobs in mills and machine shops had 

 learned something during their stay there. They had learned 

 that science can teach a man how to lighten his labor, and 

 how to increase his chances of success. They brought this 

 altered point of view back to the land with them when they 

 returned. Few of them now derided book-taught farming. 

 They sent for the bulletins published by the Department of 

 Agriculture and the State Experiment Stations. They sent 

 their sons to state colleges. And their daughters. They began 

 to look on farming as a business, as well as a way of life. 



Crop rotation and the testing of seed corn became the rule, 

 not the exception, in the corn belt. In Franklin County, In- 

 diana, farmers built a plant for making rag-doll tests. It was 

 only one of hundreds of co-operative ventures tried in agri- 

 culture. Meanwhile, carloads of grain moved along all the rail- 

 roads to the Atlantic ports. The ships went out laden to the 

 gunwales. Bread for Belgium, for France, for starving Ar- 

 menians. Bread for whoever would take it. True, a fleet of 

 ships loaded with wheat which Americans had saved by eating 

 cornbread as a patriotic duty, lay in the Thames while Eng- 

 land wondered what to do with the cargo. Then someone had 

 the bright idea of carting the wheat to the breweries to be 

 turned into British ale. 



Not only did science teach the farmer how to save his soil 

 and improve the quality of his seed corn, it taught him how 

 to fight the pests of grasshoppers and chinch bugs, corn-ear 

 and corn-root worms, rots and smut which attacked the crop. 

 Actually, corn suffers less from enemies of this sort than any 

 other grain crop. In the early days squirrels cost the farmers 

 heavily. Many a boy learned to be a good shot by being sta- 



