"Farm Town"

and churches

Happily the inroads of industrial civilization have not crowded out the spaciousness of the city. Homes are built to last for a long time for the people who live here are content with their homes and their city. And in a city of homes there are churches, many churches which tell of the stability of the city's people, and more than anything else tell of the wholesomeness of the community.

PHOENIX used to be a farm town, but not any more. Phoenix is an agricultural metropolis.

Those words, “farm town,” convey to the average person a picture of a crossroads village with whiskered grangers whittling and by-goshing and spitting on the porch of the general store.

That isn't Phoenix, state capital and county seat of the county that stands eighth among all counties of the nation in value of annual agricultural production.

That isn't Phoenix, trading and supply center for 400,000 of the richest and most highly mechanized acres ever brought under the plow.

You'll meet farmers in Phoenix, plenty of them. But you'd never recognize them for that, if your conception of a farmer has been gained from the comic sheets and Hollywood. From their appearance they might be bankers, professional men, insurance salesmen. But get into conversation with one and you'll find that he is quietly proud of being a farmer, more than proud of the food and fiber that he produces for a grateful world It's very possible that he has an office in the Security building or the Title & Trust. If his office isn't there it's in his home his electrified and air-cooled home-out on the farm. He keeps books and yield records and operates an array of enterprises as efficiently as any captain of industry. This isn't to say that the Phoenix trade territory, Maricopa county, is an area exclusively of big farms and big farmers. There are small farmers, too-thousands of them, down to just a few acres and not counting those who hold jobs in the city while raising part of the family Ever hear of guar? It's a new and important crop because its seeds yield a mucilage invaluable in paper making and now unobtainable from former foreign sources. Over 1,000 acres, like this yield on the Mesa Experimental Farm, are flourishing in Salt River Valley this season.

living on a suburban tract. Salt River Valley and its environs offer opportunities to everyone who is farm-minded, whether his ambitions and capital encompass a dozen sections or an oversize lot with chickens and a cow. Jack Swilling and his compadres were farm-minded when they re-excavated an old Indian canal and led water from Salt River out to a few of the valley's most fertile acres. They could see that this was good farming country, but they never dreamed how good. Men of vision were they, and it's not their fault if their vision fell far short of the valley's glorious future. What they saw was a spot to grow alfalfa, barley, wheat, a little corn and garden truck, for the settlements of a raw and turbulent frontier. Any of them would have stared

PHOENIX IS NOT A "FARM TOWN" BUT A "FARM METROPOLIS"-AND HEART OF THE EIGHTH RICHEST AGRICULTURAL COUNTY IN THE UNITED STATES. CROP FAILURES ARE UNHEARD OF-THE GROWING SEASON TWELVE MONTHS A YEAR-LAND RICH AND FERTILE.

In disbelief if told that Salt River Valley cantaloupes, cauliflower, carrots, cotton, oranges, grapefruit and sugar beet seed would one day move by the trainload all over the United States, even by the shipload to foreign lands. They Farming is big business in this valley. Farmers demand fast and perfect work from the dozens of "tillage contractors" who serve them with heavier machinery than they can afford to own individually. Right, This is what is done when a farmer decides to put a piece of Valley land into alfalfa. From five to eight crops are cut annually and a ton to the acre at each mowing is not unusual.

One Salt River Valley grower, John Jacobs, grows and ships more broccoli than any other individual in the world. Only a small part of the plant is cut, the rest is fed to hogs or plowed under. This highly specialized irrigation agriculture leaves little room for waste.

Luscious dates are produced in garden near Phoenix-not thousands of pounds, but thousands of tons.

wouldn't have known what you were talking about if you had been here to tell them that broccoli, guar and hegari, within a short life span, would grow on thousands of acres which then produced only tarweed and mesquite. Back there in the 60's and 70's, those crops were not grown anywhere on this continent.

Phoenix was founded to serve the new farm community that those fearless, hard-working, Indian-fighting pioneers carved out of the desert. Had there been no farmers there would have been no Phoenix. Nor would there have been any Mesa, Tempe, Glendale, Peoria, Gilbert, or Scottsdale. Phoenix and its neighbors owe not merely their prosperity, but their very existence, to the soil.

Those early settlers needed merchants to sell them horse-drawn plows, mowers, rakes, balers, threshers, scrapers, and the merchants came. They needed horses and mules, so the horse-and-mule yards came. They needed blacksmiths to shoe their animals and repair their implements, so the blacksmiths came.

Phoenix has grown and changed with the Huge machines, capable of handling great quantities of Hegari (left) and milo maize (center) are kinds of sorghum planted on many thousands of Salt River Valley acres for grain and for silage.

Growth and change of its agricultural “back country.” The changes have brought a dozen cotton gins, several cotton oil mills, the largest meat packing plant between Fort Worth and Los Angeles, cattle feeding pens, flour mills, fertilizer plants, insecticide plants, warehouses, sheds for packing melons and vegetables, citrus packing houses, warehouses, seed stores, creameries, chick hatcheries, well drillers, tillage contractors, nurseries, scores of other establishments to fill the farmer's needs, to store and process and box his products for shipment. The horse traders and their blacksmiths have disappeared. Their places have been taken by immense truck and tractor agencies catering mainly to farmers; by enormous shops equipped to repair everything the farmer uses, from the moter of a $10,000 crawler tractor down to a garden hoe. There are large concerns selling nothing but irrigation equipment a list that includes pumps, valves, steel or concrete or steel pipe, canvas, and literally hundreds of other items used little or not at all in a country that depends on rainfall.One of the city's large office buildings houses the officers and employees of the Water Users' Association, the co-op of farmers which operates the 240,000-acre Salt River irrigation project. In another building will be found the county agricultural agent, the home demonstration agent, and their busy staffs. Entire floors of down-town skyscrapers are occupied by “growershippers” of lettuce, cantaloupes, and an assortment of “winter vegetables.” Scattered about the city are offices for scores of Federal agencies serving agriculture. Among these are the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Farm Credit Administration, Farm Security Administration, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Soil Conservation Service, Grazing Service, Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine, Bureau of Plant Industry, and Bureau of Reclamation. Here are headquarters of the Farm Bureau Federation, Cattle Growers Association Corn is a minor crop in the Valley because other crops fit into the picture better.crops in record time, are employed on the expansive acreage devoted to farming in the Phoenix area.

Cattle Feeders Association, Wool Growers Association, and many another statewide farm or livestock organization.

Yes, Phoenix is a farm to excuse us, a farm metropolis-without exactly thinking of herself in that way. Agriculture is so deeply woven into the city's history, life, commerce and aspirations that the Phoenician is unable to conceive of any other kind of a Phoenix. Only a newcomer turns to gape at the huge truckloads of hay, grain, cotton, melons, fruit, cattle and vegetables as they speed through the streets. Common conversation is of stored water in the reservoirs, of groundwater levels, the fifth cutting of alfalfa, what's going to be done for cotton pickers, lettuce thinning, rations for pen-feeding beef stock, the "set" of grapefruit, pollination of date palms, flat versus furrow irrigation for cotton, whether flax should be planted on beds or by broadcasting, the high butter fat test of someone's dairy herd, deep plowing, the newest barley variety proved at the Mesa Experiment Farm. But one subject which often enters into farm conversation in less favored climes, is never mentioned in Phoenix. That is crop failure. There has never been such a thing in these parts, and never will be. An occasional light yield of this or that, certainly; but anything that might be called a crop failure is unknown. Why?

First of all, irrigation. There is almost never enough rain in Maricopa county to grow any kind of a farm crop. Farmers welcome rain when it comes, but they don't depend on it. Yet drought hold no terrors for them. They are insured by wells and by dams which impound the runoff from hundreds of square miles of mountain and forest up on "the watershed."

At the start of every season, every farmer in every organized irrigation district is notified of his water apportionment. He knows what he is going to receive from his district's pumps and from its reservoirs. This apportionment is made without anticipating a drop of rain; it is based on known well capacity and on water actually in storage. If a farmer has his own private well, he knows how much he can pump from it and what his pumping is going to cost.

Drought, therefore, has been eliminated as