Bob McTeer

Texas A&M University Agriculture Program Conference

College Station, Texas

It’s good to meet the people who keep the “A” in A&M. And who constitute one of the University’s and the System’s most renowned programs. What makes a good coach? Good players that make a successful chancellor. Good presidents and deans like Bob [Gates] and Elsa [Murano].

Farmer Bob. I’ve been thinking about whether I have any connection to agriculture, and I was coming up dry. When it occurred to me that I do like to EAT, and, in the wintertime at least, I also like to wear clothes. My bio says I grew up in rural Georgia. I’ve been meaning to change that to “I grew up on the side of the road,” because people equate rural with farming and assume that I grew up on a farm. The only farming I ever did was in my mother’s vegetable garden, and most of that was trying to keep newspapers over the new tomato plants so the hot sun wouldn’t get them.

Most of my school friends lived on farms, however, including all my girl friends. That meant they were usually stronger that I was and knew a lot more about biology. They were at least as strong as the women of Lake Wobegon. Norma, especially, since her family had chicken houses and she used to toss around heavy sacks of chicken feed. So she could beat me up then, and probably still can. I recall picking up Ann at her house late one afternoon while her mom was milking a cow. She called me over to teach me how to do it. Judging by my results, she wasn’t a very good teacher. Luckily, I didn’t have to live on freshly squeezed milk.

A more exciting memory of life on the farm in the 50’s was the night the brakes failed on my Dad’s car, a 1956 Buick Special. The Buick, my date, Reba, and I all ended up in her Dad’s corn field. Actually, only the front of the car was in the corn. The back wheels were dangling over the ditch. Reba got her Dad out of bed, and he went to the barn to get his tractor and a chain to pull us out. Before he returned, Reba got on the back bumper and jumped up and down until I got enough traction to drive out—through the corn field. They don’t make bumpers like that any more. Anyway, I left the scene before the guy with the chain arrived.

The only farmer that I had much personal contact with back then—other than through their daughters—was Billy Joe Hopper. Billy Joe lived about three miles up the road and grew cotton and chickens. When I was around 10 years old, I picked cotton for a couple of weeks for Billy Joe—long enough to learn that there must be better ways of making a living. Although I’ve had no pleasure greater than riding on top of a load of cotton at the end of a long day on the way to the gin—well, almost none. We got three cents a pound, and I struggled to get 100 pounds that would bring me $3.00. The real cotton pickers—i.e., the adults—could pick over 300 pounds a day and earn over $10.00.

Years later, my brief experience as a little cotton picker came back to me when thinking about productivity in the economy. When economists use the word “productivity” they mean “labor productivity,” or output per hour of work. Most people naturally assume that has to do with labor—how hard they work, how skilled they are, and so forth. It does, but output per worker usually has even more to do with the capital he has to work with. That was a lesson John Henry, the steel driving man, learned late in his life.

The difference between my 100 pounds of cotton and the adults’ 300 plus pounds of cotton had a lot to do with labor. They were older, bigger, and stronger than I was. They picked with both hands, and they generally knew what they were doing. They were more productive than I was due to their skill advantage.

But the big surge in cotton-picking productivity didn’t occur until Billy Joe got a mechanical cotton picker, and suddenly one person operating that thing could pick several acres of cotton a day. That’s pretty much the story all over. Some productivity differences are due to labor, itself, but not the quantum leaps. I didn’t learn quite as much about productivity on the farm from Billy Joe’s chicken houses because the first time I went into one, I stepped on a baby chick and never went back. But I’ve heard that he got pretty productive there too. I think the first new things he did were putting automatic window shades and lighting in the houses to trick the chickens into eating night and day. I think my house is rigged the same way.

Over the Christmas holidays, I visited a nephew in rural Georgia who had just built six modern chicken houses near his mountaintop home—a bit too near, if you ask me, depending on the wind direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody in this room is working on that problem. I hope so, because I still recall what it was like when Billy Joe’s chicken catchers stopped by our truck stop in their overloaded poultry truck on their way to Macon Georgia. That’s where Elvis caught his ride.

From the farm to the factory. In recent years, much has been made of the decline in the number of manufacturing jobs in our economy. It peaked just after World War II and has been stair-stepping down ever since. Many people—those people actually affected personally and the generally uninformed—tend to think this is a bad thing. They say “Pretty soon we’ll be a nation of hamburger flippers. We’ll just be taking in each other’s laundry,” they say. Nonsense! We are producing more manufactured goods than ever. While manufacturing jobs have alternated between flat and down, manufacturing output has continued to rise, with only brief interruptions, year after year. We’ve been producing more goods with fewer workers and freeing up workers for the ever-growing service sector. Producing more of the old stuff with fewer workers and producing new stuff with the remainder is how our standard of living rises. Our standard of living rises through productivity.

And productivity has a lot to do with capital—and inventions and innovations—the products of research—and with disseminating the new approaches to the working population. I think maybe that’s what our universities and agencies are about: research, teaching, service. You may buy this story, but most folks don’t. Something in their DNA tells them differently. So when trying to make the case that rapid productivity growth in manufacturing is a good thing, even if it means fewer onshore manufacturing jobs, I’ve tried to convince them indirectly by citing the example of the great productivity explosion in agriculture, which seems easier to understand and accept. What I remind them of is that, in this country’s early years, over 80 percent of its citizens worked on the farm producing our food and fiber. Now, we are producing more than ever, with fewer that two percent of our workers on the farm. Isn’t this clearly a good thing?

We don’t call the jar half empty by saying that 78 percent of our citizens lost their good farm jobs and had to settle for inferior manufacturing jobs and service sector jobs. No, we keep the flame of romantic nostalgia burning for the little house on the prairie, but we recognize that productivity is progress and that progress is better measured by how few jobs it takes to grow our food rather than how many. That’s just as true in manufacturing, but we are too close to it to see the big picture as we now can in agriculture.

I don’t know the agriculture numbers precisely. But down from “more than 80 percent of the jobs to less than two percent” is approximately right. Manufacturing employment peaked at about 49 percent just after WWII and is now around 11 percent. They say the factory of the future will employ only two: A man (or woman) and a dog. The man’s job will be to feed the dog. The dog’s job will be to keep the man from touching the computer. In other words, it will run pretty much like my nephew’s chicken houses.

Thank you for what you do in research, teaching, extension and service. Thank you for your role in keeping the productivity and progress going in agriculture and the related life sciences. And for playing a key role in the ever-rising standard of living of the American people. In that, I’m proud to be your colleague.