HOME-GROWN FOOD FOR AMERICANS

[Photo caption]: Where Japanese farmers raised foodstuffs before their evacuation, the job of providing even more food for wartime America goes on. At one of the units of Farm Management, a corporation of business men farming without pay, rhubarb is being graded, trimmed and weighed by a group of women shown in the photograph at the left. Mrs. Myrtle Haugen, left, lifelong resident of the Auburn area, is supervising the job. Others, reading from rear to foreground, are Mrs. M.A. Ranney, who came from Missouri a year ago; Mrs. M. Albert, Kent resident for 12 years; Mrs. Amelia Brennan, also a longtime resident of the valley, and Mrs. Alice Cain, who came to Washington from Nebraska in July. In the picture a the right, Mary Ducatt, whose home was formerly North Dakota, holds a big "bouquet" of the crisp rhubarb which Caucasian operators of former Japanese farms as now harvesting. The fat stalks come from the forcing sheds a vivid crimson, the color extending in heavy veins in the pale leaves.

Vegetable Shortage?

Jap Evacuees' Farms Are Producing Plenty

Local Farm Management Group Is Formed; Forgets Profits; 'Society Women,' Children Assist in Production Program

By HELEN REYNOLDS BECK

Pessimists predicted gloomily that there would be a vegetable shortage in the Seattle area when the Japanese were evacuated. No one else, they declared, had the patience and the willingness for back-breaking work to bother with truck farming.

Today, 97 per cent of the 983 evacuated Japanese farms in Oregon and Washington are in production, the actual crop acreage exceeding the former 23,669 figure, according to Edward M. Joyce, district supervisor of the evacuee property division of the War Relocation Authority.

No one group of people can be credited with this satisfactory state of affairs, Joyce said. Caucasians, singly and in groups; some old-timers, some newcomers from the Midwest, have taken over some of the farms; Filipinos have taken others, particularly those on Bainbridge Island; Indians from Canada and from Washington reservations with help with some of the crops; "society" women have become ideal farm hands, and hundreds of school children are counted on for other work.

Group Is Formed

Particularly interesting is the Farm Management Corporation, which came into being this way:

In the face of government appeals for more foodstuffs, Roy Ingalls, manager of Washington Packers, Inc., at Sumner, began to fret last year over the dozens of Japanese farms not yet occupied. He talked about it to Harold Foster, grower and poultryman, and treasurer of the Washington Co-Operative Egg & Poultry Association; Willard Young, Sumner automobile dealer, veteran of the First World War, and now engaged in building huts for the Army, and J.C. Nettnin, retired grower, for many years associated with a mail-order house.

The result was Farm Management, in which none of the five incorporators draw any salary or other compensation until their preliminary $11,713 indebtedness is cleared. They are just in the business to provide food, and they devote their week-ends and some evenings to dirt-farming when their other work is finished. Foster was chosen president of the group, and Nettnin is the treasurer.

The 600 acres which they have leased directly from Japanese owners, or on which they have taken over leases held by the Orientals, are scattered throughout the Sumner-Auburn-Kent area. For convenience, the land was grouped in six units, with a general manager, six unit managers--all middle westerners; a mechanic to keep the machinery, pooled for all units, in condition; an office girl and two crop specialists, including a lettuce man brought from California. Manpower, too, is pooled in emergencies.

Depend on Residents

For other help, they depend on nearby residents, on townspeople, on southerners and middle westerners brought to the coastal area by the Farm Security Administration, and on school children. The F.S.A. has done a wonderful job of selection in its newcomers, Ingalls said.

"They're all people we're proud to have," he declared.

Farm buildings are being renovated to house these people, and the little "bunkshacks" erected for berry pickers and other harvest hands are being remodeled into small apartments, Ingalls said. There is sometimes a bit of difficulty obtaining materials, he admitted, "but thank goodness we can get paint, and that helps a lot."

Wives of many business and professional men, who ordinarily would not be job-seeking, turned out to help with the harvest last year. They are called "society women" by the managers, Ingalls related, but in no spirit of criticism.

"They told us to get more of those society women, that they were some of the best help they had," Ingalls said.

Despite a late start last season, weather and help difficulties, Farm Management harvested 1,218 tons of foodstuffs last year. This year they hope to top the 2,000-ton mark.

Some of the land will be doing double duty. The first spinach is coming off some of the acreage now. On many plots, early spinach will be followed by another crop of late spinach, or by beans and corn.

Most crops will be those advocated by the government, Ingalls related--spinach, beets, carrots, berries, celery, beans, peas. But one other crop, rhubarb, is serving two happy purposes.

The other crops would keep the crews busy only about nine months of the 12, Ingalls explained. And Farm Management did not want to lose its crews--they are too hard to reassemble. Hence rhubarb, which keeps everyone busy during the otherwise slack season. Besides, the crop may be worth as much as $40,000.

38 Rhubarb Houses

The Farm Management units have 38 rhubarb houses turning out the crimson-satin stalks. To the uninitiated, rhubarb culture is like this: The plants grow outdoors two or three years. Then they are plowed up, and the root clusters, looking much like a bunch of parsnips, are packed in snug rows inside low sheds. A thorough soaking follows, and after eight or ten days, fires are built in stove in the sheds. This warmth incites luxurious growth of the stalks, and within four or five weeks the first may be pulled. This goes on for four or five weeks before the plants are exhausted. Then they are tossed out and disced into the soil for fertilizer.

Smaller rhubarb stocks were culled out and discarded in former years, but they will be frozen this year, and income from this source alone will pay for the expense of handling the crop, Nettnin said.

Other Groups Formed

A half dozen more corporations have been formed to take over former Japanese farms, Joyce said. One group has taken 38 farms at Bellevue.

Filipinos have taken all but 2 per cent of the land composing 36 Japanese farms on Bainbridge, Joyce related. Strawberries are the principal crop there, their worth in normal years about $300,000, he said.

Three thousand Indians from Canada, permitted by an old treaty to come to this country for berrying and fishing, will help harvest these berries, Joyce said. The first will arrive in six weeks or two months, in family groups. Last year a half dozen Filipino-Indian marriages resulted from the trip, Joyce went on, a circumstance adding to the happiness of the Filipino farmers, unable to bring brides from their homeland to this country.