1942 - Agriculture

Agriculture

Soviet geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov dies of malnutrition at Saratov January 26 at age 55 in the concentration camp where he has been confined since 1940. Vavilov's anti-intellectual rival T. D. Lysenko advises Josef Stalin to switch from traditional grain crops to millet, which requires less moisture.

J. R. Geigy's New York office receives a 100-kilogram shipment of the "miracle powder" DDT from its home office at Basel (see Müller, 1939). It goes almost unnoticed until company chemist Victor Froelicher translates the claims for DDT into English and sends a sample to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The army has given the USDA's entomology research station at Orlando, Fla., responsibility for developing new pesticides that will protect troops from malaria, typhus, and other insect-borne diseases; field tests quickly demonstrate DDT's high degree of effectiveness against mosquitoes and lice (see 1944).

Japanese-American farmers interned under Executive Order 9066 see others take over their fields. They have tilled only 3.9 percent of California's farmland but have controlled 42 percent of the state's commercial truck crops—22 percent of the U.S. total—including as much as 90 percent of California's artichokes, cauliflower, celery, peppers, spinach, strawberries, and tomatoes. Rumors have circulated about "Jap" flower and vegetable fields planted "arrowlike" pointing to nearby military installations. The Native Sons of the Golden West and likeminded "patriots" have coveted the truck gardens, fruit stands, grocery stores, restaurants, and other property of the now dispossessed Japanese-Americans, many of whom work as volunteers in the sugar-beet fields of Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming and are credited with saving the crop. The first Mexican "braceros" (farm workers) arrive in California as the internment of Japanese workers creates a demand for agricultural labor.

Florida becomes the leading U.S. producer of oranges, passing California.

U.S. farmers are generally able to obtain all the gasoline they need for their tractors, trucks, and other machines despite rationing.

Elvin C. Stakman of the Rockefeller Foundation persuades Washington State plant pathologist J. George Harrar, 36, to leave his new post as head of the state university's plant pathology department at the end of the school year and lead the program to redevelop Mexico's rural economy (see 1941; 1943).

Americans cultivate "Victory Gardens" in backyards and communal plots as vegetables become scarce, especially in California, where two-thirds of the vegetable crop has been grown by Japanese-Americans. Forty percent of all U.S. vegetables are produced in nearly 20 million Victory Gardens but the number will fall as interest flags.

Organic Gardening and Farming begins publication at Emmaus, Pa., where electrical equipment manufacturer and dramatist manqué J. I. (Jerome Irving) Rodale, 43, bought an old farm 2 years ago. One of eight children of a grocer on New York's Lower East Side, Rodale was a sickly boy who built up his strength with body-building and self-improvement courses. He has read the work of English agronomist Sir Albert Howard (see 1940) and convinced himself that organic farming (a term he invented) has been held back by a conspiracy of money-grubbing chemical fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers, who make large grants to the agricultural colleges. Department of Agriculture experts say highly mechanized modern farming would be impossible if it were dependent on bulky organic fertilizers, which are prohibitively inefficient to ship and handle, and would require far more manual labor, but Rodale discounts such objections. He sent out 10,000 flyers to farmers 2 years ago in an effort to get subscribers for a magazine that he called Organic Farming, failed to sell even one subscription, has changed the magazine's name, and finds some modest success among elderly gardeners (see nutrition [Prevention magazine], 1950).

Britons "Dig for Victory" and raise vegetables in backyard gardens.