boys-and others like them-with schooling which they never used in their own community.

Of course, most of this expense was for salaries and school supplies, so much of the money stayed within the community. But this money could be spent only once by those who made it, so the spending entailed some drain on taxpayers and parents. It may be guessed that many did without such things as medical attention, farm improvements, and better home equipment to provide schooling for their children.

It might be thought that others whose education had been provided elsewhere came into the community to take the places of those who left. But this county lost in total population from 1930 to 1940. By 1942 the population had declined to 6,724. It is doubtful whether the people moving into the county had either the potentialities or the education of those who left.

Mitigations

Several qualifications to these observations need to be made for this particular community. (1) Several capable young men remained in the community. (2) Able high-school performance does not necessarily indicate able rural leadership 20 years later, though I could not now suggest a better index. (3) Decatur County is in the more seriously eroded part of the dust bowl of 1934-36. Some of its land would undoubtedly be classified as marginal and submarginal. In this county probably a population loss was a benefit; at least, if the mean size of farms increased, it should eventually bring a better living for those who remained.

How many of these boys migrated to cities probably better able to support education? To States that probably have a smaller child-adult ratio than the one they left? They have been claimed by Boston, New York, Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego, Oklahoma City, Chicago, and Berkeley.

While one of the boys went to one State, Oklahoma, with tax resources less than Kansas, according to Ashby's Efforts of the States to Support Education, issued by The National Education Association in 1936, in which the States were ranked according to their ability to support education, 12 of the boys went to six States with greater tax resources than Kansas. Two still work in Kansas, and eight have not established permanent residences.

Nor is the financial drain on the community finished. All of the boys have yet to come into their legal inheritances. When this happens, there will be other financial payments by this community to other communities. For example, Albert and Eldon are the only children of a father who owns a half-section of land. Upon his death, if these holdings are still intact, the farm will apparently be owned by absentee landlords. Then a tribute, in the form of rent, will leave the county annually. Or if the heirs sell the farm, payment must be made to them from the earnings of the farm. This is another way of making the rural communities the financial debtors of the populous centers.

But the drain in terms of detriment to the social and long-time well-being of the rural community, which cannot be demonstrated quantitatively, but which has obvious im

plications, is the one that concerns us most acutely.

All this points straight to the importance of providing a means for equalizing educational expenditures. When trying to give good schooling to their young people rural communities must not constantly be put to greater disadvantages as a result of these very efforts. As the urban communities are not reproducing themselves, a constant stream of youth will pour into the cities. Movement and mobility are characteristic of our national life. The movement is not to be halted. But some equalization of expenditures should be devised so that rural communities will not be taxed for educational services they extend to urban communities. Don't we need something like a definite policy or program? We have talked about it a lot. Isn't it time to get busy?

A more complex problem is to devise some method of regulating the flow of inherited wealth from rural communities. This problem is accentuated by the differential birth rate. For years to come, perhaps always, young people will leave the farms and go to the towns and cities. Isn't the correct adjustment a matter for public policy?

Pointed up also is the need for more attractive and inviting rural communities. Both opportunities and surroundings need overhauling. Educational emphasis on rural life and better farms and farm homes, where it does exist, is all to the good. Vocational agriculture departments and 4-H clubs in many schools should definitely interest some of the capable youth in farm activities, and encourage them to live on the farms and to grow rapidly into positions of

local leadership. But the roots of the problem will never be reached by 4-H clubs or vocational agriculture courses alone. Why did the vocational agriculture department of the Decatur High School attract only 4 of the 21 boys although 18 were farm boys?

Does the consolidation of schools sometimes work against the building of a strong rural culture? Usually the children are brought into the nearest urban communities. Here the schools and their programs are likely to be dominated by a school board, or a school administration, which is chiefly urban in viewpoint. We need, for the country, a form of rural education that is suited to the best life of the people in the rural community-not an education set up in terms of an urban society.

Concern

I am an educator, not a rural sociologist, but to me it seems obvious that we must study the needs and the relationships of rural and urban communities in terms of the desirable population and economic balance of our national economy. None should deprecate the fact that young people go to the cities if they gain by it, nor the abandonment of submarginal land. But all should feel concern over conditions that may threaten to reduce our agricultural people to peasantry and that add to the good acres that are abandoned. We must assist rural communities through adequate economic organization to maintain a strong agrarian economy so that farm people can live in a way that is comparable to the way other groups in the population live, even though it is their own way.

ACTUAL work of conservation can be adjusted to war-it can be streamlined, so to speak, to meet the needs of a Nation suddenly plunged into production for war. The soil and water conservation movement is not a thing that can flourish only in peace. It is a hardy growth-not tender. War is incompatible with conservation, but conservation provides a way of meeting wartime needs.

The wide scope and the many phases of soil and water conservation work give it a flexibility and a strength that will stand the people of America and the United Nations in good stead in the next few years.

Some people believe that conservation tends to restrict production and reduce yields. This belief, which seems to be self-perpetuating, probably arose from the fact that any thorough conservation program must necessarily include provision for retiring from cultivation the land that is not suitable for that use. People may have reasoned, very simply: "Less land in production-less production." But there is such a thing as reducing a proposition to such simple terms that it no longer is

true.

Nothing in fact is farther from the truth, in this case. Conservation

methods actually increase yields. However, the grave misconception that conservation reduces yields may not be entirely due to lack of public understanding. In the early days of the modern conservation movement there was no great need for increasing farm production generally. There was only a normal demand and there were sizable surpluses in a great many crops.

Conservationists at that time, therefore, were not primarily concerned with production-their imperative concern was to stop the ogres of land exhaustion and soil erosion. This meant putting control measures into effect on some land and taking other land entirely out of crop production to put it to such other use as grass or trees. A great many people thought that land in trees was unproductive land. There may be a few who still think so, but they're learning fast.

So far as control measures were concerned, most people thought they were bound to cut down yields. If you put strips of grass or a low-growing legume across your wheat field, for example, you'd have just that much less acreage in your regular crop, they reasoned. It looked like an extremely elementary problem in subtraction. But they overlooked several compensating factors.

Even the scientists and technicians in the conservation work didn't know definitely about the compensating factors. They suspected their existence, but a good scientist is not going to announce publicly that black is black, until he has found that it is by a series of tests and research experiments or has ample data to prove it. Until the scientists and technicians knew they were right, they declined to say that conservation techniques would increase crop yields at the same time they were protecting and building up our soil and soilour soil and soilmoisture resources.

But now they know. Experiments with many kinds of crops throughout the country have proved conclusively that conservation farming methods do increase yields-per acre and per farm. That is important at any time, of course, but it is doubly important now.

We know now that food is a vital component of the material of war-as -fundamental as guns, ships, planes, tanks, ammunition. Food is needed for the Army, the Navy, for the civil population who are working harder under greater strain than ever before, for our Allies among the United Nations to augment what they can produce at home, and for the territories that come under our protection. Finally, we need to build up a reserve of food for use after victory-it will help vitally in the rehabilitation of some of the countries the Axis nations have conquered and

overrun.

Winning this war is the uppermost thought in the life of every man, woman, and child in the United Nations. We can do no less than our utmost to achieve this. For our fighting forces, this means winning battles; for our workers, it means

producing more technical war material; for our farmers it means producing more food and fibers.

Brings Increase

The basic thing for every farmer to remember-and apply on his own farm-is that conservation farming is not only the best way to achieve the necessary production increases— it is the only sound way to do it. Farmers all over the country have found that conservation methods not only can but do increase yields of many kinds of crops, per acre and per farm.

Take that staple article of diet, the potato. In a commercial potatogrowing section in New York State, the yields ranged from 10 bushels to 44 bushels more per acre for potatoes grown on the contour than potatoes grown in fields in which the rows ran up and down the slope.

Planting on the contour isn't the only conservation measure that will increase yields. A vineyard on a farm near Hector, N. Y., after it had been mulched with approximately 12 tons of straw to the acre, produced 8,100 pounds of grapes to the acre, compared with a yield of 6,000 pounds per acre before mulch was used.

Bigger yields of other food crops, such as sweet corn and tomatoes, have been recorded as a result of conservation farming methods, and other crops respond similarly.

Corn is one of these. On the basis of several hundred field observations supported by experimental data, it is estimated that if the practice of contouring could be applied to one-third of the corn acreage in the Corn Belt, our corn production would be increased by nearly 100 million bushels.