COUNTRY LIFE IN THE WEST 41 



The farmer in the corn belt has his labor problem, too, though 

 I have never heard any one predicting the doom of the corn belt 

 on that ground. The fact is that while the existence of the labor 

 problem is recognized, it is of such minor significance as to be 

 almost negligible. Fortunately for Western agriculture and 

 American society in general, there is no proletariat of agricul- 

 tural laborers. There are practically no farm laborers of the 

 European type that is, men who expect always to work for 

 wages as farm hands. The typical farm hand is a young un- 

 married man, usually the son of a farmer living in the neighbor- 

 hood though frequently a foreign immigrant who "works 

 out ' ' for a few years merely to get money enough to begin farm- 

 ing on his own responsibility on a rented farm. 



The scarcity of farm labor, however, in no way interferes with 

 the success of corn-growing. In the first place, the corn-grower 

 works with his own hands, and so do the other members of his 

 family. Riding plows and cultivators, disk harrows and corn 

 harvesters, as well as twine binders and hay stackers, so reduce 

 the amount of muscular strength needed that a boy of ten years 

 of age will frequently render almost as much service as a grown 

 man. 



Another factor which contributes to the solution of the labor 

 problem is the distribution of the work of the farm over the 

 year. On a typical corn farm there .is no season which is pre- 

 eminently the 'busy season, unless the corn-plowing has fallen be- 

 hind because of wet weather. Though farmers with whom I 

 talked universally agreed that corn was by far their most profit- 

 able crop, there were very few farms where corn was grown 

 exclusively. With a given labor force, only a certain amount of 

 corn can be cultivated, anyway, and it requires no more labor 

 force to grow a certain amount of other crops in addition. 

 Wheat and oats are sown before corn-planting time, and are 

 harvested after the corn has been "laid by" that is, after the 

 plowing is finished. The hay harvest also comes in this interval, 

 and the threshing is usually done before the corn-husking be- 

 gins. Moreover, the stubble fields can usually be plowed in the 

 interval between the harvesting of the small grain (wheat and 

 oats) and the husking of the corn. Thus the farmer in the corn 



