35 2 Singing Valleys 



you hadn't wanted things to happen, you hadn't ought to 

 have got me a bitch/' 



It is true, you cannot stop Nature. You can only co-operate 

 with her. Even that is a privilege which sometimes costs a 

 man dear. For Nature knows no laws but her own. You can 

 explore those laws, as Mendel and the geneticists have done. 

 You can invoke them, which is the way of the corn-makers. 

 You can submit to them. The last is perhaps the wisest course 

 for the many. 



For man has not yet learned more than a fraction of what 

 Nature has to teach. The problems which confront the corn- 

 growers today; the problem of changing farm values; the prob- 

 lem presented by the disparity between standards of living in 

 the towns and on the land; the problem expressed in that 

 equation which reveals that whenever food is plentiful and 

 cheap at its source, the cost of transporting it to the con- 

 sumer goes up, are advance notices of the lessons Nature is 

 about to teach us. Actually, the freight rates of American rail- 

 roads make corn shipped from the corn belt to New York 

 more costly than Argentine corn shipped to the same port 

 from Buenos Aires. ' 



The only progress man ever makes is at the point of dis- 

 comfort. Nature knows this, for it is one of her laws, too. 



As our civilization has unfolded to the point where few of 

 us can use, and none of us requires, all of the energy which 

 corn as a food has to give, the push and squeeze of circum- 

 stances are forcing us to turn our American cornfed genius 

 for adaptability toward finding new outlets for the life which 

 is stored in the golden kernels of the American grain. 



It may be said that we are beginning at last to digest our 

 corn with our brains. 



