For tall, burly Pat Benedict, 44, the day begins as early as it did for farmers in Mesopotamia in 8000 B.C. He rises before dawn to pull on boots, blue jeans and work shirt. By 6 a.m. he is breakfasting with some neighbors at the Double D Diner off Interstate 94 outside Sabin, Minn. . For an hour or so, he trades community gossip, argues about politics and drops casual remarks about crops and prices designed to feel out what his fellow farmers are doing without asking them a direct question, which is taboo. Then off to the fields—and into the computer age. Benedict makes a quick trip by pickup truck around his 3,500 acres of wheat and sugar beets. At each of many stops he whips out a pocket calculator and does some rapid figuring before giving the hired hands orders on, say, exactly how much pesticide to spray on each field. By 8 a.m. he is heading home to start the most important part of his day: several hours spent at a rolltop desk in his small study. There Benedict goes over computer print-outs analyzing his plantings acre by acre: inputs of seed, fertilizer, irrigation water, machine time; output in bushels and dollars. He draws up precise operating schedules for his half-million dollars’ worth of machinery; after all, every gallon of fuel saved adds a few more cents to profit. His print-outs also help him ponder marketing strategy and financial problems . Sometimes he pauses to reflect wistfully that the demands of managing a business with $3.5 million in assets keep him from doing as much of the actual planting and harvesting as he would like. Says Benedict: “I miss it, because spending eight hours in a tractor cab is a therapeutic kind of work. But I can’t assign myself an all-day task running a machine any more. I have to be able to move about to make sure that it all comes together.” For a farmer to complain that he does not get to spend enough time in the fields must be something new in the 10,000-year history of agriculture. But in the U.S. of 1978, Pat Benedict is archetypal of the farmers who make U.S. agriculture the nation’s most efficient and productive industry and by far the biggest force holding down the trade deficit. Revolutionary changes are sweeping the croplands, making agriculture an increasingly capital-intensive, hightechnology, mass-production business. As a result, U.S. farmers are dividing into two distinct classes. Small farmers, who do not have the technical expertise, are rapidly leaving the land. Large farmers, like Benedict, who know how to use credit and the latest in agricultural science, are gaining an ever greater share of the market. They produce most of the food that the U.S. eats and almost all that it sells to the world. To succeed in this fast-changing, low-margin business, a fellow has to be nimble. Says Jack Neuman, 45, who raises corn, soybeans and hogs in Sangamon County, Ill.: “It used to be that if you had a child who wasn’t too bright, you’d say, ‘Son, you’re going to be a farmer.’ Nowadays, if that dumb kid comes along volunteering to farm, you’ve got to say,
