In an April 1943 National Geographic Magazine article titled "Farmers Keep Them Eating," Frederick Simpich writes:

In the fields. That's where American farmers, including women, girls, and school children are fighting now—fighting frost, heat, dust, drought, mud, flood, and insect pests, growing our biggest crops in history.

Food is as much a munition as TNT. Farm tractors and milk wagons, like tanks and cannon, are war machines.

Farmers don't get killed and wounded on battlefields, get decorated with medals, or have to sleep in mud and snow. Yet without this 'soldier of the soil' all armies would soon have to quit, for it is still true that an army travels on its stomach.

During World War II (1939–45) the American farming community gained more from the wartime economy than any other segment of the U.S. population. The more acreage a farmer owned and cultivated, the more...