Shape of Things

Farming is a business that changes slowly -- except in wartime. This year's seed catalogs, agriculture college bulletins and reports of new research tell an exciting story of improved plants that promise higher yields of foodstuffs and fodder, of forgotten crops returning to favor, of drug plants formerly imported, now vital crops in the U.S.

There are new kinds of soybeans with a higher oil content than the old. An improved alfalfa resists wilt. Two brand-new types of red clover can yield a ton more of hay an acre than the old, once-popular ordinary variety that fell into disfavor because it was not winter hardy. A Canadian wild rye, new as a forage crop, promises heavier yields than the common meadow grass. Flax, a minor crop until 1942, is getting a tremendous boost from the introduction of machines to handle it. Hybrid corn, no newcomer in the Middle-west, is being improved for use all through the U.S. ; this year it has extra importance because it has all but crowded out open-pollinated corn in the corn belt.

There are odd plants unimportant in acreage but vital in the war : quick-growing Russian dandelions for rubber, cattails and milkweed to be used as filler in life preservers, henbane used as a sedative.

Department of Agriculture plans call for 500 acres of belladonna to be planted this year in east central states, notably Pennsylvania. In 1939 scarcely a handful of belladonna seed could be found in the U.S., but that was carefully grown and made possible a good 1942 crop whose product, used for surgical therapy, was above U.S. Pharmacopoeia standards.

Most sizable of the new crops is hemp, which will be grown this year on 350,000 acres in the midwest. To prepare for the new crop some 35,000 acres of hemp were grown in Kentucky and harvested for seed last year. For processing the hemp into badly needed ships' rope the Department of Agriculture is financing the construction of 71 midwest factories. Hemp was a big U.S. staple even before the Revolution, was used for homespun garments, twine, sacking, rigging, cables, hangmen's nooses. But foreign competition half century ago killed U.S. hemp production. Now Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard has listed it as a vital war crop.

About such developments are U.S. farmers reading these winter nights. And with reason: here might well be the shape of things to come, a key to post-war stability better than any program out of Washing ton, far better than habit-forming reliance on wheat-corn-cotton.

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