FARMING IN THE TENNESSEE VALLEY

New Zealand Journal of Agriculture, Volume 74, Issue 1, 15 January 1947, Page 73

FARMING IN THE TENNESSEE VALLEY

“The final crop of any land is the Peopleand the Spirit of the People.” —From a Tennessee Valley Authority publication.

PROBABLY no other single statement could better express the ultimate philosophy of the Tennessee Valley Authority, well known as TVA, than the sentence quoted above from one of the authority’s numerous farm advisory publications, as it is to the ■ •

total betterment of the whole community and in the more abundant living of all the people that the directors of TVA look for the true measure of the success of their efforts. Too often the spectacular evidence of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s activities commands so much publicity that it is overlooked that TVA is much more than a series of massive dams and great hydro-electric power generators— more than a huge flood-control scheme that harnessed an unruly river and converted it into a power-producing and navigable waterway. All these achievements were but the means to an end— end measurable only in terms of

healthy, prosperous, and happy urban and rural communities. The unique quality of TV A does not lie in its engineering achievements, great as these may be, but in the manner in which this organisation has integrated and co-ordinated all of those factors which add up to a

better “final crop.” The TVA directors thoroughly appreciated the fact that it was not enough to harness the Tennessee River -—that their work would be far from completed when their last dams and locks and power stations were built, if at this time there remained a people who were impoverished, even backward, poorly nourished and spiritless, without security and without hope ,of ever doing more than scratch a precarious living from rapidly eroding, mineral-deficient soils. And so it was necessary to include ip. TVA activities a farm improvement programme involving research and advisory work, both directly and through existing

The tremendous effects on rural and urban life of the farm improvement activities, involving research and advisory work, of the Tennessee Valley Authority are described in this article by N. Lamont, Assistant Irrigation Officer, Christchurch, who , returned recently from the United States, where he made a study of irrigation and farming methods in areas where irrigation schemes operate.