Leadership Quote by David F. Houston

A sentence like this looks like farm trivia until you remember who’s talking: David F. Houston, a Progressive Era politician and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, speaking in the idiom that actually moved budgets and ballots. “Where it succeeds” is the quiet hinge. It’s a politician’s acknowledgement of risk dressed up as agronomy: barley can be a powerhouse, but only under the right conditions, and government’s job is to help create those conditions through research stations, extension services, irrigation, and seed improvement.

The word “weight” does political work too. He’s not praising barley for taste or tradition; he’s praising it for measurable output. That’s the early 20th-century state talking in the language of efficiency, calories, and animal feed conversion. Feed per acre isn’t just a metric, it’s a worldview: land should be optimized, and agriculture should be legible to planners. In an era shaped by urbanization, industrial meat production, and looming wartime supply pressures, “feed” signals a chain of consequence from field to livestock to price stability.

The subtext is persuasion by practicality. Houston doesn’t sermonize about rural virtue; he offers a utilitarian argument that flatters farmers as rational managers and invites them into a modernizing project. Even the modesty of the claim (“any other small grain crop”) frames policy as common sense rather than ideology: choose the crop that wins on yield, and you’re already halfway to national prosperity.