“Carolina Farm Comment” by F.H. Jeter, Extension Editor, N.C. State College, Raleigh, as published in the Wilmington Star, March 5, 1945
The year 1945 will long be remembered in the homes of America. This is a trite thing to say when my two boys and your boys, and your sweetheart, and hour husband, or perhaps your father are in the armed forces and you pray every day that they shall do their duty and come through unscathed by hurts of war. We shall remember the year 1945 because of them, of course, but if we are not very careful we shall also remember this year because of the food situation.
Information from Washington is to the effect that the army will step up its buying and that many of the foods which are now critical with us will be bought in larger quantities than ever. We saw that this week in the higher point values going on fats and cooking oils. There seems to be a fear that once Germany collapses, if she does, the peole of the United States will let down in the war effort and will not push things hard enough for us to have the supplies with which to whip Japan into submission. That sounds like good logic but it means that civilians are going to feel the good pinch.
At the risk of being repetitious, therefore, I am going to ask every reader of this column to do something about it. In other words, if you live in town and have a garden spot, please plant a garden and look after it all the year. If you are on the farm, please have a family-sized garden in which you can grow all the fresh vegetables your family will need for fresh use and for canning. If you are selling off your brood sows because of the high price of feedstuffs, please save at least enough of these to provide pigs for your home supply of meat and a little to sell to your town neighbors who know nothing about raising hogs. If you do not have the feed supplies for your dairy cattle or for your beef animals or sheep or poultry, please begin to plan right now about the feed you can grow and see that it is planted, grown, and harvested.
It is not becoming in an agricultural worker perhaps to attempt being a prophet. No one can read the future, but, certainly one can see what the trend is, and despite the lack of labor and the hardships which farmers will have to put up with in 1945, they must look after their home supplies of food and feed. Louis Broomfield said in 1943, I believe it was, that we would approach famine conditions by the summer of that year. He didn’t know what he was talking about because the farmers of America broke all records for food production up to that time and then went on to break them again in 1944. But they had good seasons. So far in this year, we have had no serious droughts, nor any great insect or disease outbreaks to affect our production of food and feed crops. “This has been true now for seven straight, successive years. It is simply too good to last. We may be in for the seven poor years of Joseph’s day. It could not be as serious with us as it was with ancient Egypt because we have a greater diversity of soils and climate over this nation and are not dependent solely upon rains at the upper reaches of a river.
But we could be hurt and hurt badly if something happened to the normal food supplies of the nation. North Carolina should never want for anything. From the seashore of Wilmington to the tops of the mountains, we have soils, climate, rainfall in such variance that some groups, somewhere, will have good crops. We can grow anything that can be grown anywhere else in the nation and then something more. Our orators have told us that time and time again. The ting we must do, however, to think through the situation as it might affect our own, individual farms and then make our plans to that we shall not want on any farm. Then we also have an obligation towards the family in town that normally busy the surplus that we produce. Society is so divided that some of us make our living on the farm from the land, while others make their living manufacturing or trading in the things which we need or in handling the things which we produce. We, therefore, have a responsibility to see that these persons do not suffer from a lack of nutritious food.
We can increase our production of corn this year by using good seed, by fertilizing with more nitrogen, and by better cultivation. We have better pastures for our livestock because we have used ground limestone and phosphates upon them and they will turn out more gallons of milk, more pounds of beef, and more eggs and broilers. Victory Gardens are off to a good start in some states to the south of us. In some of the states, governors have issued proclamations urging all citizens to plant gardens and to husband the surplus. Reports from all parts of North Carolina indicate that we shall have as many home gardens this year as we had last year. This is good as far as it goes; but, the fact remains that we did not have many gardens last year as we should have had. The town people fell down on this job a little and if they are wise, they will remedy the situation in 1945.
And just this one other word about food supplies. We are going to need all kinds of foods. Meat will be almost impossible to get later on. If we are to be properly fed, we must have fresh vegetables, peas, beans, and other vegetable high in protein. Then, too, there is a place for more small fruits and berries. North Carolina is a natural berry state. The old-fashioned gardens of the past years always contained small fruits and berries. They added much to the diet. They sharpened the appetite. They made delicious refreshments for those who came to see us. Let’s begin to grow more of them and thus better enjoy the other homegrown food that we shall have on hand.
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