Women's Land Army Is Ready, But Farmers Slow to Accept Them, 1944

“Editorial Comment” from the June, 1944 issue of The Southern Planter

The Women’s Land Army

Miss Nancy Tyree, Assistant State Supervisor of the Women’s Land Army for the Virginia Extension Service dashed into our office in Richmond the other day in desperation. “I’ve just visited 16 colleges in Virginia, contacted scores of groups of city women, and spoken before numerous women’s clubs,” she said, “and city women are definitely interest in helping out in the acute labor shortage on farms this summer. They want to work and are willing to learn. ‘The need is so great and the appreciation of farm people so genuine’ are the reasons most often given for their desire to sacrifice jobs at higher pay and shorter hours in town to help with the food harvest. But here’s my problem,” Miss Tyree continued. “We have the women, plenty of them, but the requests by farmers for workers from the Women’s Land Army are so slow coming in that I’m worried about work for all the women. Can’t you help me locate these patriotic, willing women workers on Virginia farms where the need is greatest?”

Every state has a Woman’s Land Army this year. In the North and the East, there this type of labor was used in agriculture last year, farmers were more than pleased! Applications are pouring in for women workers in the Valley of Virginia, where city women and girls spent their vacations last summer picking apples, tomatoes, and helping generally on farms. The work of Maryland women on farms last season attracted Nation-wide attention. But farther South our farmers, though desperately in need of farm labor, have over-looked what may be the answer to the farm labor problem—the Women’s Land Army. There are in the United States today 5,000,000 unemployed childless women, many of whom are willing to work on farms.

Three kinds of women farm workers are available: Drive-Ins who drive out in groups each morning to farms and go back to town for the night; Live-Ins, who live in the farm home like members of the farm family; and Camp Workers. There the demand is great enough to justify the expense of establishing a farm labor camp in a community, the women live together in camp and work on farms in the neighborhood. Such a camp is already in operation in Timberville, Virginia.

Miss Tyree’s predicament is typical of the Women’s Land Army leaders in all of the states. They can get the help if you want it. And if you do want it, won’t you notify your county agricultural agent or home demonstration agent immediately so that recruitments may be made now for the summer?

Little Farmers Make Big Yields

Once again the small, low-income farmers, receiving credit from the battle-scarred Farm Security Administration, have demonstrated their food producing power. For the second consecutive year FSA borrowers have increase production of food at a faster rate than the national average. The following figures just released by the U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics show production increases for essential commodities for 1942 and 1943:

	Percentage Increase
Product	1941 to 1942	1942 to 1943
Pork	36	56
Beef	38	43
Milk	20	18
Chickens	36	47
Eggs	31	32
Soybeans	160	37
Peanuts	88	22
Dry Beans	6	15

According to the 1940 Census 47.5 percent of all farm families in the United States produced less than $600 worth of farm products in a year, including the value of that used in the farm household. This amount was barely enough to feed and clothe the family. Certainly there was little left, after family needs were supplied, for the Army, our Allies and defense workers. Nearly a million and a half of these low-income farms are so situated that adequate farm management and credit would enable them to step-up production sharply. It is with this group of farmers that the Farm Security Administration has been working—extending credit, developing farm management plans and suggesting cropping systems. That FSA clients are pointing the way in producing food to win the war, the above figures leave no doubt.

Farm Organizations Weak in the South

Always a matter of grave concern to us is the lack of membership of Southern farmers in national farm organizations. In these days of pressure groups, agricultural policy is largely determined by farm organizations. Every piece of important agricultural legislation in Washington is whipped into final shape after receiving the criticisms and suggestions of the National Grange, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Farmers’ Union. Leaders of these three national farm organizations have done a magnificent job for agriculture in Washington.

But it is distressing to learn that the Farmers’ Union has virtually no membership in the South, the Grange has only 1.8 percent of its members in the 13 Southern States and the Farm Bureau, 30 percent of its membership in Dixie. Yet half the farm people in the United States live south of the Mason-Dixon line. How in the name of common sense can Southern farm people hope to make their interests felt in the legislative halls of the State and Nation unless they have strong, well-supported farm organizations? That’s the $64 question that only Southern farmers themselves can answer.