or fodder for
dairy animals. The amount of land thus released for other needs finally
amounted to perhaps 60 million acres, and maybe even more. The change
took place with increasing rapidity into the 20th century.

Also, the tractor sharply reduced labor needs for the major crops of the
United States. Even dairying, least susceptible to this sort of
improvement, felt the impact of the tractor in such things as harvesting
fodder and storing silage by running loaders off the tractor
power-take-off. Since the very founding of agriculture men had
discovered only one way to prosper in farming. The farmer had to exploit
somebody or something. Animals, serfs, slaves, tenants, sharecroppers,
or whatever, including the farmer's family and farm, had at various
times been exploited on the farmer's way to success. After the age of
machinery, however, the farmer tended to exploit the machine instead of
other people or things. People had to leave farming, but in the long run
they benefited from their removal. The machine had set them free. Chief
of the machines was the gasoline tractor.

The influence of science and technology inside a free society may have
been even more profound than seems at first glance. The farming of the
20th century, with its chemicals, genetics, machines, and all, required
not only vast infusions of capital but brains and a considerable
knowledge. Farmers had to be literate at the very least. Elitist
systems, where one group of people get educated and the others get
worked, could not accomplish much in the modern agricultural world.
Furthermore, notions of two kinds of education--one for the better sort
who think, and another for the inferiors who do the work--could and did
seriously impede the development of a modern agriculture. The
backwardness of most of the world, the poverty of the underdeveloped
countries, stemmed in large part from the impediments created by an
ignorant population.

A country like the United States with its highly technical and
scientific farming could not afford, simply could not endure, limited
educational opportunities for its people. Neither could it long endure
any class structure which placed farmers in an inferior position; for
when men feel inferior because of their work they tend to shift to some
other task, leaving the despised work to those who cannot avoid it. A
highly developed agriculture in the hands of the truly inferior, the
stupid and uneducated, would simply co