Agriculture: Toward the Square Tomato

Across Iowa’s corn country, huge machines with anteater snouts gulp the ears off 8-ft.-high cornstalks, an instant later spit golden kernels into self-contained bins. In California, packing machines out in the fields seal freshly picked lettuce heads in plastic, drop them into cardboard boxes, then dis gorge the boxes ready for market. On farms in the Southwest, machines work the fields with surgical precision, injecting minuscule broccoli seeds one by one into the soil at measured intervals.

And on even the rockiest farmland, plows dig freely across the fields, the threat of grinding halts eliminated by hydraulic systems that deftly trip the blades over hidden stumps and stones.

The U.S. farmer now makes up only 7% of the nation’s labor force, but he has more than compensated for his dwindling numbers. Advances in crop biology, fertilizers and the like have helped. But, in basic terms, it is the powerful, ingenious array of new machinery (see color pages) that has enabled the American farmer to harvest an un dreamed-of abundance.

An hour of farm labor produces more than six times as much as it did in 1920. Per-acre crop production is up by 80%. Output per breeding animal has doubled. In the 1960s alone, productivity of the average farm worker has increased by 6% a year v. only 3% for other workers. Total farm production, the Agriculture Department estimated last week, will set a new record this year (one result being lower grain prices on the nation’s commodities market). With the average farm laborer producing enough food and fiber for 39 people, the American farmer not only overfeeds and overclothes the U.S. but holds out the vision that expanding technology can eliminate the threat of famine in underdeveloped lands as well.

Bumper Crop. The nation’s 3,200,000 farms make up its No. 1 industry, with assets totaling $273 billion, a $20 billion chunk of it tied up in machinery so costly that, as Federal Reserve Bank Agricultural Economist Roby Sloan notes, “those without the managerial capacities, or who couldn’t get financing, have had to move off the farm.” As more marginal, hardscrabble farmers give up and flock to the cities, the spreads that remain are getting bigger. The average farm, just 175 acres back in 1940, now covers 359 acres, and will probably grow to 600 acres by 1980. To make a profit, says Ken Bush, 34, a Milan, 111., farmer with $80,000 worth of gear, “you have to have the volume. To have volume you have to have large acreage. To have the acreage, you have to have the machinery.”

The machines that make the modern farm hum range from manure spreaders that cost $600 to 13-ton tractors selling for $36,000. Three-fourths of all farms now have at least one tractor, and some have a dozen or more; back in 1952 there were tractors on only 47% of all U.S. farms. While the tractor remains the mainstay—some 5,000,000 are in use on today’s farms—the agricultural arsenal also includes 880,000 grain combines, 775,000 hay balers, 655,000 corn pickers and shelters. Virtually all of the nation’s wheat, corn and sugar beets are now harvested by machine. So are most soybeans, oats, cotton and hay.

All this adds up to a $3.8 billion-a-year bumper sales crop for the nation’s 1,600 farm-machinery makers, especially for the handful of big, “full-line” manufacturers that together account for nearly two-thirds of all equipment sales. The largest of these are Deere & Co. and International Harvester, each of whose annual farm-equipment sales hover around the $900 million mark. The next biggest is not a U.S. company, but Massey-Ferguson Ltd., a Toronto-based giant (1966 farm-equipment sales: $726 million) that sells 41% of its products in the U.S. With other full-line companies like Allis-Chalmers and J. I. Case also in the running, the race for customers is keenly competitive. One reason, notes Deere Marketing Vice President E. W. Ukkelberg, is that the American farmer has al ways been “one of the shrewdest buyers in the country.”

Power & Comfort. Equipment is generally getting bigger and more powerful, with the average farm tractor now boasting 65 h.p. v. 27 h.p. in 1950. The increased power enables farmers to pull bigger implements, cover broader swaths, move faster across the fields. At the same time, there is more emphasis on comfort. Combines and tractors are now available with roomy, enclosed cabs featuring such luxuries as heaters, air conditioning, radios, tinted glass, cushioned seats—and even automatic transmissions.

While machinery has eliminated plenty of agricultural jobs, sometimes it works the other way around, with labor shortages causing “forced mechanization.” In the case of tomatoes, field workers, turning from arduous stoop work to higher-paying jobs in town, were becoming scarce even before the first mechanical tomato harvester appeared on the market in 1960. At Woodland, Calif., Farmer Bernell Harlan, 60, is part owner of a pair of $22,000 tomato harvesters, goes so far as to credit the machine with “saving the tomato industry for California.”

It is with California-style fruits and vegetables that the boldest technological advances are likely to appear next. Scientists at the University of California at Davis have developed a lettuce picker with a sensing mechanism that “feels” each lettuce head to determine if it is ready for harvest. Similarly, an asparagus harvester is electronically activated only by stalks of the proper shape and size. For such products as apricots and olives, engineers are experimenting with shaking-and-catching devices already in use on prunes, peaches and apples; a mechanical arm clutches the tree and shakes it until the fruit drops into a canvas catching frame.

In some cases, new machinery will dictate the size and kind of food that Americans eat. In trying to develop a mechanical strawberry harvester, Oregon State University scientists are experimenting with 6,000 varieties of berry to find one suitable for machine picking. The impact of mechanization is such, predicts International Harvester Economist Dr. L. S. Fife, that crops failing to lend themselves to mechanization “will cease to exist as common commodities. They will become delicacies obtainable only at high cost through scarce hand labor.”

To Plow with Sound. Nostalgists still mourn for the days when most farm chores were handled by horses instead of horsepower, by men instead of machines. As Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman recently noted, they fear that the trend toward automation “will excise the soul from farming, destroy its joy, dull its satisfactions and chill the ageless intimacy between man and his land.” This view notwithstanding, most farmers welcome machine-age relief from what Dr. Joseph Ackerman, managing director of Chicago’s Farm Foundation, calls “farming by hunch and the Farmer’s Almanac.”

The day is approaching—”closer than you think,” says Deere’s Research and Development Chief Gordon Millar—when farmers will cultivate the soil with inaudible sound waves, work fields by computer-controlled programs, use television to monitor their remote-con trolled machines. Another phenomenon in the not too distant future is square tomatoes, which, after all, could be more easily packaged by machine—and fit better in sandwiches.

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