10 THE WAR GARDEN VICTORIOUS 
son, former Secretary of Agriculture, Iowa; Assistant 
Secretary of Agriculture, Hon. Carl Vrooman, (for the 
year 1917); P. S. Ridsdale, Executive Secretary, who 
was also Executive Secretary of the American Forestry 
Association, with the Conservation Department of 
which the Commission was affiliated, and Norman C. 
McLoud, Associate Secretary. 
The sole aim of the National War Garden Commis- 
sion was to arouse the patriots of America to the im- 
portance of putting all idle land to work, to teach them 
how to do it, and to educate them to conserve by can- 
ning and drying all food they could not use while fresh. 
The idea of the “city farmer” came into being. In 
every part of the country were communities where 
land and labor were already together, where it would 
be necessary to move neither the mountain nor Maho- 
met. Near every city were vacant lots, “slacker 
lands,” as useless as the human loafer, to whom, per- 
haps, Mahomet must be brought. Whether the land 
to be cultivated was a back yard or a vacant lot, it was 
a potential source of food supply, and the raising of food 
on these areas would solve many problems besides that 
of food production. Food raised by the householder 
in his yard or a near-by lot, was “Food F. O. B. the 
Kitchen Door. ” There were no problems of transporta- 
tion or distribution to be solved in such food production. 
The creation of an army of soldiers of the soil pre- 
sented much the same difficulties presented by the 
creation of any other army. First of all there was the 
matter of recruiting. This was a purely volunteer move- 
