"Since the war began in 1914 and before the first draft was made there
is reason to believe that more farm workers had left farms than there
are men in our army and navy together. Those men were drawn away by the
high wages paid in munition plants and other war industries, and their
places remain unfilled. In spite of the new classification, future
drafts will still further reduce the farm labor supply."

With a million and a half men drawn out of the country and ten billion
dollars to be expended on war material, making every ammunition factory
a labor magnet, it seems like the smooth deceptions of prestidigitation
to answer the cry of the farmer with suggestion that men rejected by the
draft or high school boys be paroled to meet the exigency. The farm
can't be run with decrepit men or larking boys, nor the war won with
less than its full quota of soldiers. Legislators, government officials
and farm associations by sudden shifting of labor battalions cannot
camouflage the fact that the front line trenches of the fighting army
and labor force are undermanned.

Women can and will be the substitutes if the experiments already made
are signs of the times.

Groups of women from colleges and seasonal trades have ploughed and
harrowed, sowed and planted, weeded and cultivated, mowed and harvested,
milked and churned, at Vassar, Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke, at Newburg
and Milton, at Bedford Hills and Mahwah. It has been demonstrated that
our girls from college and city trade can do farm work, and do it with a
will. And still better, at the end of the season their health wins high
approval from the doctors and their work golden opinions from
the farmers.