Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1919 — Farmer of Today [ARTICLE]

Farmer of Today

Hi* Opinion Is Sought and Respected

Urban sophistication In the cities poked fun, before the war, at the farmer. He was supposed to be uncouth and gullible—a child of nature. He chewed a straw and pulled his beard and greased his boots and rose by lamplight, and was a man with a hoe among the herds and orchards, a man to whom the great round world was a blank page or a distant myth. Now that Is changed, says a writer In the Philadelphia Ledger. The farmer is an applied scientist, whose opinion is sought and respected, with whose hand, as it is busy or idle, is the feeding or starving of the nations. For millions during the war life has been a grim, unmitigated quest of food. The ftrm has had to yield by Intensive cultivation many times its former produce, and marketing in haphazard ways has had to yield to methodic and speedy transportation. Farm work and farm life today utilize every last development of engineering. The machinery has revolutionised farm labor, and electricity and gasoline are the greatest of all hired hands. The motorcar, the tractor, the dairy machinery, the telephone are commonplaces where once they were unknown. The demobilized fighter no longer regards indifferently or scornfully the chance the farm holds out to him. The fields are clamoring for him — fields where the battle is for life and not for destruction.