Leadership Quote by David F. Houston

Technocratic common sense can be its own kind of ideology, and David F. Houston’s line reads like a velvet-gloved directive from the early 20th-century American state: if you want more crops, plant more acres. The phrasing is careful, almost antiseptic. “Most effective step” signals managerial authority; “may be taken” softens it into policy-speak; “grown habitually” naturalizes existing regional patterns as if they’re simply facts of soil and tradition, not products of power, land ownership, and market access.

Houston, a politician deeply associated with the era’s expanding federal role in agriculture (and the administrative mindset that came with it), is speaking from a world where production is the primary metric of success. The intent is bluntly practical: raise output fast without the messy work of changing techniques, labor conditions, or rural credit systems. But the subtext is sharper: don’t disrupt the status quo; scale it. “Enlarge the acreage” privileges those who already control land and can expand, while sidestepping who bears the costs - tenants, sharecroppers, migrant laborers, and ecologies strained by monoculture.

The line also betrays an implicit skepticism about innovation. Instead of boosting yields per acre, diversify crops, or address distribution and price instability, Houston’s solution is extensification: more land, more of the same. It’s a policy sentence shaped by a national project - feed markets, stabilize supplies, keep the machine running - where “habit” becomes a rationale for inertia. In that sense, it’s less an agricultural insight than a political one: growth, framed as neutral, is easiest when it asks the least of existing hierarchies.