Grains The secret of America's passionate interest in keeping the
European market open to this most loathsome of her farm products is, of course, that poultry are effective conversion units for turning part of her immense grain surpluses into a higher-priced commodity, saleable abroad. It is hard to explain the origin of this problem to anyone who has never had any farming ex- perience, but the truth is that seeing a grain crop through from seed-time to harvest is one of the supreme pleasures, and that farmers work for abundant harvests just as •much because they believe in them as because they like Jaguars. I find England with its present large grain acreage incomparably more beautiful than it was in the late Twenties and early Thirties, in the days of agricultural depression, slut farming, and tumble- down pastures thick with ragwort, thistles and hawthorn scrub. You have to break farmers' hearts before they will let the land get into that condition; what they like are clean fields brim- ming to the edges with ripe grain. I have never seen England looking lovelier than it has been since this year's huge acreage of barley began to ripen, and I am almost able to convince myself that the aesthetic returns justify the subsidies which keep farmers happy while they do what they best like doing. It is too bad, however, that so much of that white gold will find its way into such dens of iniquity as broiler houses and the even nastier sheds where calves are fattened into baby beef on slatted floors.
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