A Time for Planting in Illinois

"Burn down your cities and leave our farms," William Jennings Bryan once said, "and your cities will spring up again as if by magic, but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." Amid tales of urban blight, the U.S. may find solace in the enduring, seemingly endless reach of its fecund farmland. The nation is still sustained by the richest bounty of produce on earth, and it is sowing time again. TIME Correspondent Frank Merrick last week visited Erv Walters' farm in northern Illinois. His report:

ERV WALTERS is an archetypal American farmer: rugged, sinewy, industrious and forthright. He has spent nearly every one of his 51 springs working the rich Midwest land. In 1941 he and his wife Lucille came to Illinois from their native Wisconsin with, as he proudly recalls, "nothing more than the clothes on our backs and $500 in cash." They have been remarkably successful. Together with his sons Dick, 28, and Dan, 24, Walters now owns 765 acres of prime farmland around the towns of Hebron and Woodstock; today the land is valued at more than $1,000 an acre. Three homes, three barns, five machinery sheds, three feed lots and a dozen silos stand about the spread. Throw in a rumbling squadron of assorted machinery --tractors, trucks, combines and related equipment--plus the cattle and hogs Erv and his sons are fattening for market, plus the $100,000 worth of planting costs. Add it all up and the Walters appear to be worth about $1 million. Erv Walters wryly notes, "I and the bank own quite a lot."

Like so many successful American farmers, Erv is actually cash poor. "The city people think we get real rich," he says, "but I've worked many a year and not earned a nickel." He gave up dairy farming years ago because that requires extra hands, and hands cost goodly sums of hard cash. "When you're a farmer," his son Dick points out, "you never have any money in your pocket until you retire and sell out, because it's all invested. We get paid every few months, while a hired man would have to be paid every week and earn as much as he would in industry." Erv readily admits that sons are as important as they ever were in working the land. Without sons who can be persuaded to stay down on the farm, a farmer simply goes out of business when he gets too old to handle the chores himself--as is happening to two of Erv's neighbors. Also, inflation does not stop at the city limits. The Walters receive the same price for their crops that they did in 1953 (though livestock prices are now higher), but a tractor that cost $2,300 then now costs $10,000.

One consequence is that farmers like Walters have adopted some basic corporate principles: efficiency and diversification. This year the Walters will use their own and additional rented land to plant 1,000 acres of corn, 400 of soybeans and the remainder in hay and oats. Over the year they will fatten 800 cows and 1,500 hogs for market. Says Dick Walters: "If one thing fails, you have an opportunity to balance out your loss." Walters' crop mix is typical. He usually grows corn on a particular field for two years, then switches to soybeans for a year. Gone is the ritual slopping of hogs; Erv's animals are fed carefully calibrated mixtures of corn and protein automatically through ducts that connect his silos with the feeding troughs. Absent too are some of the more familiar animals, such as horses and chickens. They are no longer profitable. As son Dan pithily sums it up: "If it don't pay, we don't have it."

All of this makes contemporary farming something more than a bucolic communion of man, plow and earth. Says Erv: "A farmer these days has to be a good buyer and seller--that's the important thing. But he must also be an electrician, soil analyst and veterinarian. If he isn't, he's sunk." Each winter Erv and his sons attend courses in nearby towns given by the Extension Service and firms that try to keep farmers abreast of advancing farm technology. Lately Walters has added the omnipresent computer to his list of farm aids. For $80 a year a computer firm analyzes the Walters' operations, comparing them with those of equivalent farmers. -

Still, the love and feel of the land, not to mention its daily demands, are eternal verities. "Book learning might teach you the basics," Erv says, "but you've got to have the experience. You need to have little things in the back of your mind--what to do about a sick animal, what to do if the weather changes--and these things aren't there unless you grow up with them." And, he might add, work with them ceaselessly. During planting time Erv rolls out of bed at 4:30 a.m., dons heavy green coveralls against the morning chill and tends to the barn chores before the cock crows. After breakfast at 6, he clambers into the enclosed cab of his 100-horsepower, red-and-white Farmall tractor and chugs into the field he will plow that day. Dinner at noon, supper at 6, then back into the fields to work by the light of his tractor's headlights until 9:30 p.m.

When planting is over around early June, Erv will take a badly needed fishing trip up to Michigan. The rest of the summer will be spent cleaning barns and attending stock sales; winter will be devoted to classes and machinery repair. There will be regular Saturday night dances ("Lucille and I would rather dance than eat," Erv grins), but mostly Erv's year will be a day-to-day battle just to stay even. Then it will be spring again, and time for planting. It is an exhausting and relentless cycle, but that is the way men like Erv Walters prefer it. "We aren't making much money," he muses. "We just farm because that's what we want to do."

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