Aging & Wisdom Quote by David F. Houston

Agricultural advice from a politician lands with a particular kind of quiet authority: it treats farming not as pastoral virtue, but as national logistics. David F. Houston isn’t admiring buckwheat’s rustic charm; he’s selling resilience. The line is engineered to reassure people living on tight margins that there’s still a move left after the “more exacting crops” have already claimed the best soil, the best timing, the best attention. Buckwheat becomes the understudy that can still save the show.

The phrasing does political work. “May be planted later” is a permission slip in an economy ruled by deadlines and weather. “Often does well” is careful, bureaucratic optimism - realistic enough to be credible, hopeful enough to motivate action. And “old meadows or waste land” reframes neglect as latent capacity: land that looks spent is recast as productive, if you know what to plant and when. That’s a subtle populism, a way of honoring thrift and improvisation without romanticizing poverty.

Context matters: Houston served during the Progressive Era and into World War I as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, when “efficiency” was a moral and political keyword and food production was increasingly tied to national stability. Read that way, buckwheat isn’t just a crop; it’s a policy metaphor. Use the margins. Don’t let anything sit idle. A modern ear can hear the same logic in today’s rhetoric about “underutilized” resources and “workforce participation” - the belief that the solution is always to squeeze one more harvest out of what’s left.