Across the Editor's Desk The following is a book review by S. W. Martin in a column called “Bifocals” in the summer 1971 issue of Better Crops With Plant Food. While we can’t speak on the book itself, we think the WM GARDEN SPOT UNIT ANNUAL MEETING Monday Evening, Nov. 15, 1971 7:30 Farm & Home Center -Guest Speaker - Mr. George Steele, President of Agway Board -Election of four member committeemen -Management Reports -Selections by Marlene Hershey and Daughters. DOOR PRIZES As a beef operator you're interested in maximizing your profit picture. You’re looking for new ideas, new methods and new innovations that will help "beef up” your profit. Here's a program worth looking into. It's called "Van Dale Systems Feeding." It starts with maximizing your production of total digestible nutri ents with increased haylage and silage. This permits the best use of your land and cattle coupled with a fully mechanized feeding system. Van Dale has the equipment and know-how for maximizing profits through mechanized feeding. FORAGE BOXES So let's bring it in from the field with a Van Dale Forage Box. These rugged built units are equipped with exclusive auger-type “beaters” that deliver all kinds of forage under all kinds of conditions. No clogging at the blower, as the forage is metered between the augers —not over the top! SILAGE DISTRIBUTORS Van Dale distributors insure even silage distribution throughout the silo for a maximum fill The 1640 Power-Fil’s unique revolving deflector plate diverts the explosive force of incoming material and spreads it evenly in a con tinuous sweeping pattern to the wall. The 538 oper ates in an elliptical motion, directing forage -to the outside walls of the silo. Varied spout rotation speed allows for even fills. SILO UN LOADERS There's a Van Dale unloader for every feeding application. These high performance twin-auger units can handle virtually any silage or haylage under the most adverse conditions... frozen, gummy or what have you, and do it fast. The 1230 has been customer-certified in the field to outperform, and outlast any make its size. For hard work in smallersilosthere’sthelo2oF. The Inch ' : il ! built for silos from 20 to 40' has a capacity up to 40 tons per VA3M DALE book review represents a spirited appeal for the attitudes and values which have made our increasingly efficient farm economy possible: GEORGE SHUMAN was not a AGWAY Non-StopTeeding Box 337 • Long Lake, Minnesota REFRESHMENTS man of political or financial or deucational prestige. He was “just” an Illinois farmer. No eternal flame or marble shrine marks his grave in Woodford County. But today’s generation owes George Shuman and his wife, Lucretia, a debt. This Midwest couple embodies that handful of stalwarts who first trusted the early advice of America’s agricultural colleges—sturdy folks strong enough to shed an open tear of pride as their first son received his college diploma 50 years ago. For every Shuman there were 100 scoffers who would not listen to science in the early days—so stubborn many farm journals would not put a scientist’s college connection under his byline. Not George Shuman. He often lifted his son to his knee to read him pamphlets from Dean Davenport and Dr. Cyril Hopkins at the agricultural college. In 1907, he took his young boy to town to hear Dr. Hopkins. There the great scientist used potted plants to show corn’s greedy appetite for NPK—a CALEB M. WENGER Drumore Center, RDI Quarryville, Pa. Phone 548-2116 dramatic stunt for 1907. A half century later George Shuman’s son used the same tool to show villagers m India how much their crops craved NPK, especially on soils weary from 3,000 years of production That son, Frank, has now written a book he calls DRUM BEATS OF CHANGE. On the copy he sent us, this one-time vo ag teacher, county agent, and USA soils missionary scribbled m one sentence the past and future of mankind; “The final crop of any soil is PEOPLE and the SPIRIT of the people.” Frank Shuman’s book is dif ferent —130 living anecdotes of human nature at work in America’s breadbasket and among South Asia’s teeming millions. But it is than Illinois and India ’ and Afghanistan. It is the- story of mankind, in a sense. The story of a boy whose father worked all night with an untamed filly to SHOW his son what patience and selfdiscipline can do . . who fed two fine shotes dif ferent diets for 100 days to SHOW him what deficiency and balance mean . who used his new 1908 pocket knife to SHOW his son nodules on roots of a new wonder BULK STORAGE BINS Supplementary feeds are easily handled with Van Dale’s bulk stor age feed bins. The Superstores are available in A-Vz or 7Vz ton sizes. These units are fiberglas con structed. They won’t rust, dent, cor rode or absorb heat from the su n. CONVEYORS Whether straight-out, incline, au ger or chain, Van Dale conveyors fit most any automated feeding system. The SCCI4OO Cham Con veyor is Van Dale’s highest capacity conveyor. It handles all rations— safely. The CT 2OO and 300 auger type conveyors are adaptable to any feeding system. They're tough, efficient, easy to install >d economically priced. BUNK FEEDERS Van Dale has a bunkfeederfor every operation. The SCF 1400 Traveling Bunk Feeder is a single chain unit that will carry and feed virtually everything. The Mammoth 14 Multi-Feeder is an auger type de signed especially for multi-lot operations. The 934 and 1234 Auger Bunk Feeders are the sturdiest, smoothest operat ing, lowest cost feeders ever produced. Then, there's the stainless steel Shaker Feeder. A combination feeder and bunk designed for single lot operations. Van Dale Systems Feeding comes down to one word... efficiency. Van Dale offers var ious models and sizes of feed ing equipment to most effici ently match the needs of every feed lot layout... old or new, large or small. Check with your Van Dale dealer to see what you need to maximize your profits. And ask him about Van Dale’s new agri-leasing program. Lancaster Farming, Saturday, November 6,1971—1 crop called alfalfa . who helped his son handhoe corn from Monday dawn to Saturday dark to SHOW him a tide of weeds brought in by a 3-week rain could not conquer the Shumans. It is the story of a father who used his end of a 5-foot saw at post-cutting time to plant values in his young boy’s mind: “Look on your neighbor to find his soul and not on his garment to detect a hole.” Simple, very square for today, but a principle that made George Shuman’s son a successful and, more important, a happy man at work for people DRUM BEATS OF CHANGE tells what a young vo-ag teacher did when he found triangular hog rings clamped to the eyelids of chicken-eating sows at the home of a poor student with a stubborn father. What he did when an angry dairyman turned his shot gun on the county veterinarian come to test cattle for tuber culosis Frank Shuman pulls no pun ches —about the hurried dairyman rinsing his milk buckets in the green scum and filth of the horse tank so he could get to the Sanitary Milk Producers meeting m time Shuman helps the mature remember and the young un derstand what it felt like to wake up in 1932 and find corn bringing 10c a bushel and hogs 3c a pound, while two bankers waited for the mortgage He tells it in human terms, not in cold statistics—of family farms put under the auction hammer, of cunning speculators buying them up and getting shouted out of farmers’ meetings when griping about “government in business ” The cunning did not like a man named Franklin Roosevelt' Mr. Shuman does not mention this president, but history does. And Shuman explains why the Production Credit Association was created under FDR —in a day when the only farmers who - could get credit were those who could prove they didn’t need credit. Why Rural Electrification (REA) was created under FDR — in a day when “Electric Utilities refused to service farmers until they' were threatened with a competitor whose arms were held up by the Federal Govern ment ” Frank Shuman tells it like it was—how scores of farmers, long told they had enough “natural” potash for 2,000 years, were jarred when a potash demon stration more than doubled the corn yield on a leading farm Neighboring counties started hollering for potash trials, until a state-wide chant made K no longer a step child of the Illinois fertility system DRUM BEATS OF CHANGE is the story of a county agent whose mind was always open to change To the Hopkins idea that we must put back all, not some, not most, but ALL the fertility our crop takes off . to the Bray idea that organic matter could be main tained with continuous corn, of all things, by plowing under stalks and residue and feeding (fer tilizing) the bacteria that rot the stalks A popular practice today—but not the night Dr Bray advised it in Frank Shuman’s county nor the morning the newspaper editor called Shuman for “a statement.” It is the story of a man who did not fear . . the story of one of God Almighty’s natural-born teachers whose Maker ap parently never freed him to pursue positions and wealth and power and the other phantoms between the two childhoods of man. Instead this unfreed man found himself standing on India’s Gangetic plain one afternoon in 7
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers