FARMERS: How You Keep Them?

Locust Township lies in a quiet, verdant bowl in the mountains of Columbia County, Pa. Broad farms with prosperous farmer families upon them pattern the land like a soft patchwork quilt. It is ten miles to a town or city.

There, of late weeks, an alert young man named L. L. Hug has gone from farm to farm, sitting in consultation with each household for two hours apiece, asking pointed questions, taking careful notes. Last week his notes were being tabulated by the department of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State College, which had sent Mr. Hug forth—co-operating with the U. S. Department of Agriculture—to discover what it is that makes farm boys put on their store clothes and migrate city-wards; what rural social organizations—a four-corners movie, soda-fountain, pool parlor, rollercoaster, stuffy boarding-house—might persuade them to slacken a population shift that is believed to threaten the country’s economic future.